How we uncovered Chicago's plans to hide homeless people during the Democratic convention
How’d we uncover that Chicago spent $800,000 on a fence to bar homeless people from prominent view just in time for the Democratic National Convention?
No secret sources or smoking guns.
Just textbook journalism, one step at a time:
We wondered. Then we showed up, asked questions, listened. Requested public records. Repeated as needed.
In the months leading up to the DNC in August, the Sun-Times was kicking around lots of ideas, and our Race, Class and Communities reporting desk wondered how the convention would affect a wider swath of Chicagoans than just the political types tapped to make speeches — and cheer loudly — inside the United Center.
What about people living on the streets?
Plenty of prior presidential convention hosts have tidied up their cities ahead of their big party, sweeping panhandlers and tents from their downtowns and barring them from prime convention locations. I’d seen it myself in Denver before Chicago’s own Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in 2008.
This was all happening last summer as the city grappled with the most unhoused people since at least 2015. Across the country, questions emerged about what would happen to people who live on the streets after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that municipalities could ban people from sleeping outside in public spaces.
Would Chicago’s new mayor, a former union activist who campaigned on a “Bring Chicago Home” tax to support folks without stable housing, really push people from public view before the national spotlight turned on the city?
Our reporting team sought to find out. Specifically, reporter Elvia Malagón and me, and later Brett Chase, because a big part of our beat is covering people in neighborhoods who face the brunt of disinvestment or who are sidelined because of their identity or income.
First, we looked to find the clusters of unhoused people and the tent cities most at risk. Elvia and I sent public records requests to the city of Chicago, asking for the lists of encampments they visit monthly to offer residents help and to sometimes clean.
Enter shoe leather reporting. After plotting out the camp addresses, we started visiting them in June, including the ones closest to the United Center and to McCormick Place, the two convention venues.
Where we struck gold was on the path between them.
City records call the camp “1100 S. Desplaines.”
You’ve seen it if you've driven on the Dan Ryan expressway. On the east side of the highway, right at the Roosevelt exit, a startling swath of blue and orange camping tents popped out from the green patch of grass and trees overlooking the roadway.
Several residents of the encampment we encountered along Desplaines Street said they were told they’d be moved “into hotels” before the convention by a July 17 deadline. That’s when, they said, the camp of about 22 residents and 30 tents would be cleared.
Which hotels? For how long? Those details were unclear to camp residents.
So we talked to Brandi Knazze, head of Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services, whose job includes caring for people without permanent homes, including longtime occupants of tents who live in parks and under highways, as well as newer arrivals from the Southern border.
Knazze confirmed that she was closing this encampment permanently. Because, she said, what if the feds in charge of DNC security decided to add the path to their security perimeters?
“My plan is to make sure that we are thoughtful, that we are doing it in a trauma-informed way and that it’s not disruptive,” Knazze told Elvia and me.
People living at Desplaines and a few other large encampments would be offered individual rooms in a municipal shelter in the old Tremont Hotel off the Mag Mile. This, she said, was all part of a new summer support program. But their stays would expire at the end of August, a week after the DNC ended. (They would eventually be extended until Sept. 15.)
That was the only interview Knazze granted us for the dozen stories we wrote about the situation. Instead, every time we asked to speak with her again, her department's paid spokesman gathered our questions and responded via email. Hardly an ideal way for us to get the clearest answers for readers.
Our first story on July 11 landed hard, a scoop that drew outrage and prompted 40th Ward Ald. Andre Vasquez, a mayoral ally, to call out what he saw as a double standard.
When we tried to visit the shelter at 100 E. Chestnut St., security tried to intimidate us into leaving the wide public sidewalk out front after denying us entry. Our photo editor, Ashlee Rezin, made it clear to them that we would not be going away.
While there, we watched shelter residents being evicted. The people who had been staying there and hadn’t yet locked down permanent housing were being removed to make way for the new residents. Some cried as their belongings were stuffed into giant totes.
Some of the people who got evicted from the shelter, Brett discovered, ended up sleeping outside, across the street from the shelter — their lives now packed into shopping carts.
City officials claimed a winter program was ending, leading to the evictions. But the timing made it appear that they were kicking some people out to make room for those coming from the encampments.
Brett also got wind that the hotline used to get people on waiting lists for subsidized housing was shut down as the nonprofit overseeing it searched for a new vendor to run it.
This telephone option is a critical first step to get people off the streets and into some type of housing. It fields hundreds of calls a month, but was down for more than 60 days, and only restarted on a limited basis in early September.
On the morning of July 17, we returned to the Desplaines camp to mark its last day.
A few dozen people remained, gathered under trees that provided them with shade and cover from Chicago's harsh seasons. A woman slept on a tattered sofa. Two men hauled their stuff across Roosevelt Road in carts.
Some folks told us they had accepted the city’s offer for shelter, but others still had no idea where they would end up. Social service organizations pitched in before the city’s excavators and bulldozers cleared what remained on the land and most of the trees.
Then a Department of Family and Support Services spokesman mentioned that in addition to the chain-link fence getting bolted into the sidewalk, a “wrought iron” fence would be installed.
So not one fence around the site, but two?
By now, I hope our next steps are predictable: Go lay eyes on the new fence ourselves — a massive rack of black metal ribs that towered over Elvia and me. Send questions to the city.
The answers didn’t come for more than a month, on the day after the DNC ended. The eye-popping response? $814,000 in “emergency” funds were spent to pay for a quarter-mile’s worth of 10-foot-tall “ornamental iron fence.”
That amount of money could pay for another month of shelter and services for the displaced residents now at the Tremont, we’d later find out.
In the meantime, City Hall told neighbors of Gompers Park, home of another tent city that swelled over the summer, that the money to help put those folks into apartments had run out. No matter the dropping temperatures or the alderperson’s pleas.
Will the city's approach to homelessness change in 2025?
We don't know, but we wonder.
So we'll show up, ask questions, listen. Request more public records. And repeat as needed.
Contributing: Elvia Malagón, Brett Chase, Pat Nabong and Ashlee Rezin