Editorial: Homeless Chicagoans number steady despite 3X city spending on issue

The city’s data shows there are 6,139 homeless Chicagoans. That number has barely budged since 2014, when the city counted 6,294 homeless Chicagoans, but city spending on homelessness has jumped from $21.7 million in 2014 to $58 million in 2023.

We’ve shared our concerns that Mayor Brandon Johnson and his team have not laid out a detailed plan for how they’d use “Bring Chicago Home” tax hike funds to combat homelessness. But new data shows a plan is exactly what the city needs, because the more money that goes toward homelessness, the more the problem remains the same.

The city’s data shows there are 6,139 homeless Chicagoans. That number has barely budged since 2014, when the city counted 6,294 homeless Chicagoans.

The number of homeless Chicagoans dropped significantly during the COVID years, likely because of citywide efforts to house homeless residents in hotels and other facilities, which were vacant as tourism disappeared. But the number of homeless Chicagoans jumped back up afterward, with the city tallying 3,875 homeless people in 2022 versus 6,139 in 2023.

Additionally, between 2015 and 2020, volunteers scoured the city. But with the pandemic raging in 2021 and 2022, officials began using a “sampling approach” that sent volunteers to “100 percent of the Loop/CTA/hotspots and randomized subset of other areas around the city,” according to city records. That methodology remained in use in 2023, and was implemented again on Jan. 24, 2024, when Chicago’s 2024 point-in-time count took place.

Efforts to reduce the number of people experiencing homelessness in the city must be part of a larger plan to reduce poverty. “Of the nation’s cities with populations above 1 million, Chicago has the sixth-highest poverty rate, behind Philadelphia (21.7%), Houston (20.7%), San Antonio (18.7%), New York (18.3%) and Dallas (17.8%). Chicago’s poverty rate is well above the U.S. major city average of 15.9%. San Francisco and Austin, which have both received considerable media attention for their homelessness crises, have lower poverty rates than Chicago,” writes Bryce Hill, director of fiscal and economic research for the institute.

Will Johnson’s Bring Chicago Home proposal include a workforce development strategy? Data shows a job is the most effective way to help people get out of poverty.

Will Johnson’s plans include an education component? We know higher levels of education are associated with lower levels of poverty.

Johnson, a former educator, has to be intimately familiar with the crisis taking place in city schools, where just 26% of kids can read at grade level and 18% can do math at grade level. These are early indicators of difficulty later on, and leaders need to adjust their approach so students don’t continue to fall behind.

It’s expedient to throw money at big problems, but if the data tells us anything, it’s that this strategy is not effective long term when it comes to reducing homelessness.