Cook County chips in to help buy hotels in Evanston and Oak Park for people who are homeless; also approves water bill relief
Using some of the federal dollars Cook County received to assist with the COVID-19 pandemic, county commissioners Thursday OK’d spending nearly $14 million to transform two suburban hotels into shelters for people who are homeless and $8 million on a water bill relief plan.
The board voted to award a $7 million, no-interest, fully forgivable 30-year loan to Connections for the Homeless Inc. so the nonprofit can buy the Margarita Inn in Evanston. It also approved a similar $6.5 million loan to Housing Forward LLC and the Oak Park Residence Corp. for the purchase of the Write Inn in Oak Park.
The loans are being paid for with part of the $1 billion the county received in federal pandemic relief funding. Susan Campbell, the head of the county’s planning department, estimated there’s roughly $20 million more in federal funding to spend on similar efforts going forward.
Connections has had a master lease of the boutique Margarita Inn since March 2021, using the space as a shelter for up to 70 individuals experiencing homelessness. The county already had provided funding for that lease. But the costs — including annual rent of up to $1.5 million and $900,000 in operations — were unsustainable, officials said.
According to the plan approved Thursday, a combination of state, local and philanthropic funding will help keep shelter operations running. The Margarita Inn is staffed day and night and offers on-site case management, housing location services, health care, benefits enrollment, life-skills training, laundry and daily meals. Residents have stayed for an average of about seven months, and 57% have transitioned to stable housing, according to the legislation authorizing the loan.
Housing Forward has run similar operations and programming out of the 65-room Write Inn near downtown Oak Park for roughly two years. Part of the shelter is also home to Cook County Health’s Rise Center, a respite facility for people experiencing homelessness who are too sick or frail to recover from an illness in the shelter or on the streets, but not sick enough to go to the hospital.
The model at both hotels — providing permanent interim housing rather than requiring residents to vacate overnight facilities at churches or synagogues every day — represents “a directional change” in how people who are experiencing homelessness are served in the suburbs, officials said.
“Hotel-based shelter has become a game-changing model for how to stabilize people experiencing homelessness,” Lynda Schueler, CEO of Housing Forward, said in a committee hearing Wednesday. In the last three years, more than 400 adults and children have been stabilized at the inn, and 83% have since moved on to permanent housing, she said.
But several commissioners said they were worried the south suburbs were being left out, despite an acute need.
Carl Wolf, the executive director of Respond Now, a nonprofit serving the south suburbs, said, “Over 12,500 people, including more than 3,500 students, are estimated to experience homelessness in the south suburbs every year. … Ten out of the 11 cities with the most calls to the suburban Cook County homelessness prevention call center are in the south suburbs: Chicago Heights, Dalton, Riverdale, Park Forest, Harvey, Lansing, Richton Park, Country Club Hills.”
Commissioner Stanley Moore, of Chicago, expressed reservations about spending millions on shelter space in communities where the homeless population is low compared with his own.
“We have searched and searched to assistance, to no avail. … We need them in areas that are most hard-hit,” he said.
Officials at nonprofits said their services are part of a countywide alliance that doesn’t restrict access to help based on geography.
Campbell acknowledged the “need outpaces the availability of units” and said the county has been working to identify potential sites for permanent shelters in the south suburbs.
The measure passed unanimously.
In an attempt to stave off tens of thousands of estimated water shut-offs each year, commissioners separately authorized spending $7.8 million in federal pandemic relief dollars for a water utility assistance program. Households earning up to twice the federal poverty level in suburban Cook County would be eligible. The target opening for the program is early 2024.
Amid rising water costs, and the end of the moratoriumon water shut-offs during the pandemic as well as the federal Low-Income Household Water Assistance Program, county officials warned that suburban residents are increasingly at risk of losing water access.
As part of the proposal, funding would be provided directly to the municipality to pay for residents’ overdue bills. The funding is expected to help about 14,000 customers.
But during discussions of the same measure earlier this summer, some commissioners said they were worried cash-strapped towns or villages might divert that money to fill other budget gaps — citing municipalities that were behind paying their own water bills to their supplier, which is typically the city of Chicago or Hammond, Indiana.
Commissioner Donna Miller of Lynwood said she’d attended “several board meetings in the south suburbs” and frequently witnessed “the shock that a resident of a municipality comes to find out that their municipality has not been paying their water bill when they as a resident have been paying their water bill. To me, that’s a huge concern.”
“We know that funny things happen, and so I want to make sure that money gets to where it’s supposed to get, no matter what,” said Commissioner Dennis Deer.
“We know there have been past issues with the use of water revenues and nonpayment for water supply,” said Dominic Tocci, an official with the county’s Bureau of Economic Development.
The current program offered by the Community and Economic Development Association of Cook County had so far not run into any issues, he said, and the county had built-in accountability measures for this round of the program.
“We will ask for reporting showing that utility has used at least as much funding as the total county assistance provided for its water supply costs,” Tocci said.
Commissioner Bridget Degnen also expressed concern the county was spending a significant amount of the set-aside — about $1 million — on administrative costs, suggesting officials try to cut out the municipal middleman and pay water suppliers directly.
“My concern is that if we give municipalities a windfall for water bills, there is absolutely no confirmation or guarantee that those municipalities will pay back,” said Degnen.
While she was confident residents would get relief, she doubted the county had ways to “rectify that going backwards” if municipalities spent the money elsewhere. She voted no.
Others, including Commissioner Sean Morrison, were critical that those most at risk of shut-offs were not at the top of the list for assistance.
But the measure still overwhelmingly passed. Commissioner Maggie Trevor described the program as a “necessary Band-Aid.”
“If any of you have lost your water service for even a day or two, it’s a real hardship, it’s a health issue,” Trevor said. “And we need to make sure that we are doing what is right for our residents here.”
