A homeless man has been sleeping on a low flagstone wall at the corner of Shermer and Walters in Northbrook for the past few nights. A block from my house.
The first time I saw him, while walking our dog with my wife about 9 p.m., I steered us in a different direction, worried he would, I don’t know, leap up and stab us. It happens.
The second time I saw him, I had a very different thought: “You know, we have those extra bedrooms. Maybe we should put him up for a few nights …”
Two very different reactions — fear and kindness — that neatly bookend the general reaction to pervasive homelessness in American society.
One the one hand, we’re afraid. Even though the unhoused are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than the cause of it. Not just for our own safety, but for the health of our communities as a whole.
Few motorists driving along Lake Shore Drive, I imagine, see the tents sprouting in Lincoln Park and think: “Cool. A welcoming city provides safe space for its most humble citizens.” Not the city beautiful Daniel Burnham had in mind.
On the other hand, we recognize life is hard. There are many ways to fall through the cracks: addiction, mental illness, divorce, unemployment, poverty. Some unfortunates struggle to maintain the barest fingerhold on society.
Who among us wants to tread on their fingers? I doubt many Americans wake up and wonder, “How can I make life more difficult for homeless people today?”
Such people exist and now have a strong ally in Washington. America is in the midst of her Golden Age of Fear. It’s like we’re cycling through vulnerable communities, one by one, to see who can be demonized and oppressed next.
Trump 2.0 came out of the blocks swinging at immigrants — who now can be arrested on sight by masked police, without due process, and shipped to foreign countries while we race to build our own domestic gulags.
Then trans people, who now can be cashiered from the military for reasons that had nothing to do with their ability to serve.
Last week, the government came for the homeless, with a pair of executive orders that, in the words of the ACLU, “criminalize unhoused people and institutionalize people with mental health disabilities and substance use disorder.”
“The Trump administration issued two executive orders that fundamentally misrepresent homelessness as a criminal issue rather than a societal challenge requiring compassionate and systemic solutions,” said the National Coalition for the Homeless. “The first executive order threatens to withhold Housing and Urban Development funding from states that protect individuals from involuntary commitment to institutional care.”
Declaring people crazy and forcing them into mental institutions is an old totalitarian trick, popular in Russia and China. Let me promise you something — if the police can declare an American citizen mentally ill for living in a tent in Lincoln Park and throw him into an asylum, it can also declare an American mentally ill for protesting that policy.
Count on it. We are not sliding down a slippery slope but hurtling down a greased slide.
“These approaches are not only inhumane,” the Chicago Coalition to end Homelessness. said, “they are also ineffective and counterproductive.”
Of course they are. The administration isn’t about solving problems. The way to solve the problems of those without secure housing is to address the situations that got then there, as well as create more low-cost housing.
This isn’t just a city problem — in Northbrook, there are homeless people loitering around the public library. Every morning at 4:30 my firefighter pal running the coffee stand at the Northbrook Metra station would chase out those who’d slept there all night to make way for arriving commuters.
“It’s getting worse in the suburbs as well,” said Doug Schenkelberg, executive director of the Chicago Coalition to end Homelessness. “I don’t think any place is immune to it. Some municipalities have decided they want to address it by creating these criminalizing ordinances to push people out without regard to what actually happens to them. Other places are trying to do what they can with the resources they have.”
Speaking of doing what you can with the resources you have: I didn’t invite the homeless man to live in my house — bottom line, I’m not that good a person. Good enough to have the thought, not good enough to act on it.
But I didn’t demand the cops remove him and dump him somewhere out of sight either. What I want is to live in a society where such people are treated with decency and compassion. That society is not getting closer but further away.