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In its haste to address the ongoing migrant situation, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration appears willing to throw all his other campaign promises overboard.
Witness the abrupt and clumsy shutdown of the at-risk, youth-oriented sports leagues a week and a half ago at the Broadway Armory Park in the Edgewater neighborhood. These leagues serve hundreds of local teens. They are a model of the very types of programs that the mayor vowed to expand during his campaign to give young people alternatives to participating in chaotic “teen trends” such as the city recently witnessed again.
The city’s ham-handed, top-down approach should serve as a warning to all Chicagoans. With the shutdown of the vibrant Broadway Armory Park — on the heels of the closures of the Gage Park and Piotrowski Park field houses — the city’s migrant housing policy has entered a new stage, pitting the need for temporary shelter for asylum-seekers against the need for Chicago Park District facilities serving the city’s most vulnerable. Compounding the pain of the armory closure: At a community meeting on July 27, attended by more than 100 people, city officials were unwilling to say just how long the “temporary” shelter might be in place. But the prospect of years seems possible.
While two City Colleges — Wright and Daley — were also converted to temporary shelters this summer, migrants are now being moved out so as to not interfere with fall classes. In the case of the Broadway Armory Park, however, the city bypassed community input and unilaterally decided to shut down numerous programs that each week served nearly 1,000 racially and economically diverse seniors, young families, at-risk teens, LGBTQ+ athletes and others.
Some of these programs will reportedly be shifted to other facilities, but many of the city’s proposals to move programs are infeasible; some are miles away and inaccessible to teens without cars or fearful about crossing gang boundaries amid a resurgence of gang activity on Chicago’s north lakefront. By eschewing community input, the city is making bad decisions such as allowing a private for-profit trapeze school to continue to operate at the armory while shutting down basketball and volleyball programs for at-risk neighborhood youths.
[ Editorial: Housing migrants in Chicago police stations was a disaster waiting to happen ]
Understandably, the city is racing to find temporary shelter for migrants who are sleeping in police stations. In the wake of this unbridled rush, however, shelters are opening in buildings never intended for housing. According to city officials speaking at the armory the day before its shutdown, the city reportedly surveyed more than 200 facilities and has virtually no other vacant usable public buildings and no funding to lease private residential buildings to provide temporary shelter for the new arrivals — this in spite of the more than $150 million that has already been spent on the migrant crisis.
City officials admit that they are focusing on large, turnkey-ready, publicly owned buildings, leading them to select active park field houses where little city funding is necessary. This bottom-line strategy ignores the costs borne by the families that rely on the many essential programs being sacrificed.
The day before construction crews began converting the armory’s gyms into a massive dormitory, city officials could not tell Edgewater residents when they expect the park’s programs and community spaces to reopen. Since resolution of the migrant crisis at the southern U.S. border has been illusive for decades, Edgewater residents are understandably concerned it may be years before the armory is reopened. Residents of other Chicago neighborhoods should take heed as their park programs may be the next on the chopping block.
Chicago Tribune Opinion
The problem with this ad hoc solution is that it shifts the cost of sheltering migrants to those who can least afford it — at-risk youths and working families. These Chicagoans rely on the “safe space” and affordable recreational and educational services provided at our urban parks.
Chicago has no sustainable plan for how to continue housing and feeding the large number of migrants flowing into the city. This past spring, the City Council approved $51 million to address the migrant crisis. But according to Ald. Andre Vasquez, 40th, chair of the City Council Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, that money is now gone. Meanwhile, the city has been spending $20 million every two months just to pay operating costs for shelters.
While our current and former mayor have boasted of Chicago being a “welcoming city,” neither has assembled a plan and the resources needed from local, state and federal governments to properly care for the ever-growing number of asylum-seekers.
To deal with this crisis, the city should not be cannibalizing park facilities that serve those most in need. Johnson must swiftly develop a comprehensive plan and assemble the funding necessary to humanely shelter asylum-seekers that do not rely on sacrificing active parks or other vital facilities. Chicago communities such as Edgewater want to welcome asylum-seekers and can bring local knowledge and resources to help with this endeavor.
To develop the most effective, community-based plan for welcoming migrants to Chicago, community leaders must be at the table in planning for shelters rather than intentionally excluded.
Jack Markowski was commissioner of the Chicago Department of Housing from 1999 to 2007 and executive director of the Edgewater Community Council from 1983 to 1990.
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