Chicago homelessness on rise; advocates push for change
[January 30, 2026]
By Glenn Minnis | The Center Square contributor
(The Center Square) – Chicago Coalition to End Homelessness City Policy
Manager M Nelson is looking to change the way city officials combat the
issue as a new report authored by the organization highlights rising
numbers of unhoused residents.
“One of our pieces of advocacy that we’ve worked on with partners over
the last several years is to work to create a Chicago policy and a
Chicago system that would create a Chicago-based resource to work on
initiatives that could prevent and end homelessness,” Nelson told TCS.
“Chicago would be able to determine its own definitions, its own
flexibility and work with the people who are experiencing homelessness
to determine what it is that they need and how we best as a community
can work on that problem rather than being dictated by federal policy.”
As part of their annual report, Coalition officials pegged 2024 homeless
numbers at more than 58,000, outpacing the number of all such residents
officially counted the city during its recent point-in-time tally three
times over.
Nelson argues the widening discrepancy can largely be attributed to the
methods used, with Coalition officials also counting such forms of
homelessness as couch surfers and doubling-up, while point-in-time
figures solely stem from the number of individuals found sleeping
outside or in shelters on a night in January.
Nelson said it’s critical that authorities get as close as they can to
accurate numbers because their point-in-time count is what’s used by
lawmakers to create policy and allocate resources related to the issue.
“Anytime we’re trying to address any type of problem, we need to know
what the problem is we’re actually dealing with,” he said. “The
Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is the primary funder
for homelessness services federally, really only considers people who
are staying in shelter or outside in their resource allocations. Instead
of just trying to identify or even blame individuals for their
experiences of homelessness, we can understand the better trends and
patterns that are causing homelessness.”
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A homeless camp is set up along a sidewalk near a public parking
lot. Photo: Spencer Pauley / The Center Square
Nelson points out that blacks and other minorities are among those
most impacted, with African Americans accounting for more than half
of all those experiencing homelessness while comprising just
one-third of the city’s overall population.
“One of the things that we see is that homelessness is very clearly
an issue of racism,” he said. “We still are seeing increasing rates
of homelessness amongst people who identify as black and African
American and we can see how that overlaps with socioeconomic status,
gentrification, how people are being pushed out of the city and lack
of access to education.”
Nelson adds what he sees as the criminalization of the problem poses
yet another issue.
“When we criminalize people that are experiencing homelessness,
we’re ignoring the problem, we’re disappearing people rather than
disappearing the problem,” he said. "It’s absolutely crucial that we
continue to fight bans on sleeping outside and other ways that
people that are experiencing homelessness are criminalized.”
Coalition data also shows as homelessness has continued to spiral
across the area in 2024 the number of city housing units left vacant
topped 109,000 structures.
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