City eyeing “right-sizing” migrant shelters due to budget constraints
Asylum-seekers congregate outside and inside Chicago Transit Authority warming buses at Chicago’s designated landing zone for new migrant arrivals at 800 S. Desplaines St. in the West Loop.
Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times
Chicago is trying to shrink the city’s population of roughly 14,500 migrants in 28 shelters to accommodate “budget constraints,” city and state lawmakers have been told.
Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th), chair of the City Council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said Mayor Brandon Johnson’s deputy chief of staff, Cristina Pacione-Zayas, told him late last month of the city’s plan to, as she put it, “right-size” the migrant shelter system without offering details.
“The city feels that there is limited capacity they can take on. It’s unprecedented,” Vasquez said. “They don’t know if they can handle the scale of how it’s continuing and they’ve got to make very tough decisions given the financial restraints on how to continue.”
“What they’re determining is exactly what it sounds like,” Vasquez added. “If there’s a limited amount of funds, they can’t continue with the current shelter system and staffing levels.”
With a steady flow of new arrivals and even more expected in the run-up to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, Vasquez said he is concerned that any attempt to close shelters or shrink the population of migrants will increase Chicago’s homeless population exponentially.
“Here’s the thing we know will happen to those people: They’ll be on the street. Folks are seeing them at the grocery stores and at intersections asking for funds. They’re out here during a snowstorm and polar vortex,” Vasquez said.
“It’s going to increase the levels of homelessness in a way that, I know the city is not ready for,” Vasquez added.
Pacione-Zayas and Beatriz Ponce de León, deputy mayor for immigrant and refugee rights, did not return phone calls. Senior mayoral adviser Jason Lee had no immediate comment.
Asked directly whether the city had paused opening new shelters, Mayor Brandon Johnson told reporters on Friday, “it’s well documented that we have not opened a shelter since December.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration is planning to “right-size” the migrant shelter system.
Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times
City officials also said that a 60-day limit on shelter stays would be suspended until at least Jan. 22 — when temperatures are expected to rise.
Chicago lawmakers in the Illinois General Assembly were briefed by the city on the migrant crisis Friday morning. They were also told the city had paused opening new shelters in December, and “has begun planning for rightsizing” due to budget restraints.
After ramping up the shelter system for months to get migrants off the floors of Chicago police stations and at O’Hare and Midway airports, Chicago has not opened a new migrant shelter since late December.
The only new shelter that has opened recently was established and bankrolled by the state — at a shuttered CVS Pharmacy in the Little Village neighborhood.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker offered the Little Village CVS after quashing Johnson’s plan to build a “winterized base camp” or tent city for migrants on an abandoned and contaminated industrial site in Brighton Park.
Johnson’s $16.7 billion, 2024 budget included only $150 million on a migrant crisis now costing the city $40 million a month.
The mayor low-balled the amount to keep political heat on the state and federal governments to do more to help Chicago with a crisis that he asserted no major city was equipped to handle.
Questions about what Johnson would do if Chicago was forced to go it alone or was unable to convince the state or federal governments to meet the city half-way dominated the budget debate.
Alderpersons from across the city demanded to know what “Plan B” was. They argued that hope was not a strategy.
In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Budget Director Annette Guzman said without a major infusion of state and federal funding for the migrant crisis, Chicago may have no choice but to raid its reserve funds, endangering the city’s bond rating.
During that interview, Guzman acknowledged raiding the reserves would almost certainly cause Wall Street rating agencies to reduce the bond rating, which determines city borrowing costs.
“Exactly, which is why we’re not willing to do that. But it is an option on the table,” Guzman said. “At the time that half the year comes around — if we are in the same [go-it-alone] situation we are now — we will be back at the table discussing this with all stakeholders plus [the City] Council as well as the mayor’s office.”
Asked then whether Johnson has options other than raising property taxes or raiding the reserves, Guzman said, I can’t think of anything [else] off the top of my head.”
Instead of closing shelters or shrinking the existing migrant population, Vasquez urged the city to consider creating a “unified shelter system” for migrants and homeless Chicagoans to reduce overhead and staffing costs.
He argued that closing shelters at a time when the pace of new arrivals is only going to “scale up” ahead of the August convention will only exacerbate the crisis.
Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th) speaks during a special City Council meeting in October 2021.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times file
“We’re seeing some of it in New York, where they’re evicting folks and they’re ending up on the streets,” Vasquez said. “They’re ending up eating from garbage cans. They’re ending up trying to do what anyone would to try to survive when you can’t get a job and you can’t figure out a place to live.”
Pritzker last year announced an additional $160 million in state funding to help manage the crisis, with $30 million of that going towards the city’s intake center.
Since August 2022, Illinois has provided or committed more than $638 million to address the migrant crisis, including $115 million in direct funding to the city. The additional $160 million went towards supporting the city’s migrant crisis but was not given directly to the city.
This week, the governor said he plans to ask the legislature to approve a supplemental budget to backfill the $160 million. Lawmakers return to Springfield next week, although Pritzker said lawmakers don’t have to immediately approve the funds.
“I’ve brought this up to [the] leaders,” Pritzker said Wednesday. “They haven’t wanted to bring it up yet. I do think it’s going to be important to deal with the costs here that are rising all the time, or at least the toll is rising. And we’re all working together to try to meet the demand.”