After crashing in a friend’s apartment for a couple nights, Porfirio Elliott and his partner, Melissa, returned to their tent in Humboldt Park, where they’ve been living for six months, and found it ransacked.
“Is my blue jacket still here?” Porfirio asked. He pointed out he had lost all of his pants except those he was wearing.
“It better be, or I’m going to tear somebody’s head off,” said Melissa, who asked that we not publish her last name because of some trouble with authorities outside Chicago. “Everybody goes through our shit. Everybody!”
Porfirio stepped outside, zipped up the tent and shook his head.
“If we happen to spend a night to take a shower and stuff, the next day, we come back and half of the stuff is gone,” he said.
On a tree about 50 feet from Porfirio and Melissa’s tent, one of several “Notice of Enforcement” signs posted around the park warned that no overnight park use or unpermitted tents will be allowed after Friday morning.
That’s when officials are planning to clear away what remains of the park’s encampment, Chicago’s biggest tent city. They say they’re providing rent-free apartments to most of the residents and offering shelter beds to the rest. As encampments have proliferated across Chicago, the scale of this housing effort is unprecedented.
Homeless advocates are praising Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration and the local City Council member for coming up with the apartments; they’re also urging them to scrap the plan to remove any tent dwellers who remain. Meanwhile, the people who aren’t getting an apartment are wondering why.
Those people include Porfirio and Melissa. The two have been together for five years and, since ending up homeless last spring, they have worked hard to get their lives back on track. That City Council member would not explain why the couple is not among those getting a city-provided apartment.
Last week, as subfreezing temperatures approached, I sat down with Porfirio and Melissa at a taquería near the park.
Porfirio, 49, grew up in a neighborhood just west of the park. He works in construction. His most recent steady job included masonry, tuck pointing and roofing.
Melissa, 48, was a certified nursing assistant in Kentucky, where she spent most of her life before moving with Porfirio to Chicago. She said she works a couple days a month providing home health care and cleaning houses.
Both were longtime illegal opioid users, a habit that sometimes cost them a combined $200 a day.
Last year, the couple started to lose grip of their Northwest Side apartment. First, their landlord jacked up the rent. Then Porfirio lost his job. This past spring, they were evicted.
“Reality set in,” Melissa said. “We were on the streets. We were in a tent, no running water, no nothing.”
They lived under a bridge, then they moved into the park.
But as their life together was turning upside down, Porfirio and Melissa took a big step. They started on methadone, a treatment for opioid use disorder.
“It takes the crave away, and you don’t get sick anymore,” Melissa said of opioid withdrawal. “You’re able to function and then, little by little, get weaned off the methadone.”
The methadone is so important to Porfirio and Melissa, they walk an hour round trip from the park to a clinic every day, each time risking another plundering of their tent.
One morning, I joined them on the trek.
“Today is like a normal day — my belly hurts,” Porfirio said of the suffering that precedes the medication.
“It’s safer, at least,” Melissa said. She compared methadone to street-purchased drugs that may contain stimulants, sedatives and unpredictably potent synthetic opioids: “You know what you’re taking. We’re not doing it illegally.”
Methadone is also covered by their insurance, she added, drastically reducing their drug spending.
Best of all, Porfirio said, “we’re not waking up sick, shitting on ourselves, throwing up, can’t make it to the bathroom.”
When they finally reached the clinic, Porfirio and Melissa gave the receptionist their names before proceeding to nurses who work through windows, like bank tellers.
I followed Porfirio to a nurse, who handed him a cup holding a fuchsia liquid, as bright as Kool-Aid but bitter.
Porfirio drank it up and offered sheepish thanks.
Over the last couple months, I’ve gotten to know about a dozen people living in Humboldt Park’s tent city. Porfirio and Melissa stand out as some of the most clearheaded.
Riding my bike through the park one afternoon, I noticed a middle-aged man splayed on a lawn chair — out cold, slack-jawed, eyes rolled back.
My first thought was to yell for Porfirio and Melissa.
They sprang from their tent with Narcan, a medicine that reverses opioid overdoses.
“Give me some water, baby,” Porfirio told Melissa. He splashed it around the man’s face and forehead. “Ray, look up!” Porfirio ordered him, to no effect.
The couple sprayed the Narcan into each nostril. The man gurgled but remained unconscious.
“Hold him up where he can breathe,” Melissa told Porfirio. “I need another Narcan.”
Under pressure, Porfirio and Melissa snapped at each other, as couples will do.
“I know what I’m doing,” Melissa said. “I’m opening his airway!”
“Yo, Ray!” Porfirio raised his voice.
“I need another squirt!” Melissa commanded.
After three or four minutes of this, the man finally came to.
Buddies of his told him Porfirio and Melissa just saved his life.
“Saved my life?” the man asked in confusion.
Melissa nodded. “Four Narcans.”
I see Porfirio and Melissa responding to this crisis. I see them searching for work and making their daily trek to the methadone clinic to kick their drug habit.
But they aren’t on the city’s list for one of the rent-free apartments.
City officials say they found 63 units for people in Humboldt Park’s encampment. They say that’s the most ever for a Chicago tent city.
Ald. Jessie Fuentes, 26th Ward, said last week that 30 households had moved in. Another 33 awaited only some paperwork. Approximately 25 others — people such as Porfirio and Melissa — would be offered beds in a homeless shelter.
“It’s historic, what we’ve been able to achieve in Humboldt Park: getting 63 units, ensuring that anyone else at least gets a shelter bed,” Fuentes said. “One hundred percent of the tent encampment is going to be given an alternative to their tent, and we’re going to ensure that they’re wrapped around with resources.”
Asked for the criteria to select people for the 63 apartments, Fuentes sent a statement from Brandie V. Knazze, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services. The statement says the “units were offered to everyone living in the park” during a two-day September assessment.
On those dates, however, I met several people living in tents in the park who, since then, have not been offered an apartment. Those people include Porfirio and Melissa.
Patricia Nix-Hodes, who heads the law project of the Chicago Coalition to End Homelessness, said there is an issue more basic than who gets offered an apartment.
“Every day, people lose their housing and become homeless and need a place to stay,” Nix-Hodes said. “And we know that there’s not sufficient affordable housing in the city, there’s not sufficient shelter in the city. So, to close down a public space that people have relied on when we don’t have sufficient shelter and housing in the city, that’s where the problem is.”
In a press release Tuesday, the coalition and other homeless advocacy groups lauded Fuentes and Mayor Johnson for coming up with the 63 units but called on them to “halt plans to clear [the] park and deny space to future people in need.”
The statement said Friday’s plan “mirrors the hollow cruelty of criminalization, which tackles the visibility of homelessness more than it grapples with its systemic root causes.”
In my interview with her, Fuentes said she and other city officials were “doing everything we have to do to avoid” ticketing and arresting people who refuse to leave the park on Friday, or who arrive and pitch a tent at a later date.
She said officials want to “make sure that we are not criminalizing them, and that we are not having their first several encounters being with police but with service providers that can meet their needs.”
City officials did not immediately respond Tuesday to the call to cancel Friday’s tent removal.
But the Puerto Rican Cultural Center sent news outlets a statement from housing and social service providers in Fuentes’ ward, expressing support for “her leadership in providing sustainable and compassionate alternatives for our unhoused neighbors in Humboldt Park.”
Fuentes on Tuesday texted WBEZ: “We will proceed with the moving date.”
Without one of those rent-free apartments, Porfirio and Melissa said they were not sure where they would go when the park is cleared.
“We don’t deserve to be forgotten,” Melissa said. “We’re not bad people. At least we’re trying to better ourselves.”
They said a homeless shelter, where people are separated by gender, was not an option.
“We like sleeping beside each other,” Melissa said. “We like being around each other.”
Porfirio leaned in. “I love this woman with all my heart. Cold weather ain’t gonna stop us.”
Porfirio and Melissa said they’re going to keep hustling for work. They’re going to keep making the walk for methadone. And they’re going to do it together.
Chip Mitchell reports for WBEZ Chicago on policing, public safety and public health.