The small cluster of women stood at narrow lockers and paid scant attention to the religious leaders who were seated at a nearby table.
After a few moments, the women dispersed. But while they had been brief intruders at a press conference, the room was actually part of their “home.” The lockers housed their belongings.
It was the press conference attendees who were intruding, sitting at one of the tables where homeless women meet for meals at the Olive Branch Mission.
The dining room in the women’s section also serves as a bedroom during the winter months, officially designated as Nov. 1 until spring. During those weeks, 30 mattresses are brought out, laid on the floor, and used as overnight beds. Then, before breakfast, the mattresses are taken, cleaned, and brought back out after dinner.
Women are separated from homeless men who get food and shelter at an adjacent building, also part of the 120-year-old mission on West Madison Street.
The site was deliberately chosen this week by the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago for a press conference on affordable housing.
The group supports a proposed city ordinance that calls for building or preserving 35,000 units of affordable housing over the next five years. Rabbi Mordecai Simon said the ordinance “will give those who otherwise cannot acquire or even dream of having something of their own, a home.
“They deserve more than a place on the sidewalk and a three-by-one (foot) locker,” said Simon, who is executive vice president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and a member of the religious council.
Rev. Yvonne Delk, a council member and executive director of the Community Renewal Society, echoed that sentiment. “We are more concerned how we house our missiles than how we house poor men, women and children,” she said.
Council President Rev. Paul Rutgers, who heads the Presbyterian Church’s Presbytery of Chicago, credited Mayor Richard Daley with putting the housing issue “on the front burner” this week, where the religious community feels it belongs. “Churches and synagogues have been on the front lines providing shelter and services to homeless families for years,” Rutgers said. This week, the Olive Branch served as Exhibit A.
“We are saying to the mayor, `Don’t forget the poor when planning next year’s housing budget,’ ” Rutgers said.
On Monday, Daley pledged an additional $228 million in city spending for affordable housing over the next five years. But he insisted that such housing must be a mixture of moderate-income and low-income units, not focused on the latter.
The religious leaders agreed that there must be a housing mix. But they fear that Daley’s initiative leans too far toward the middle and won’t meet the needs of the working poor, unemployed and homeless at the low end of the economic strata.
“Our focus is on housing for the poor,” Delk said. “If mixed-income housing is the way to do that, I support it. If mixed-income housing overwhelms, or becomes a complication for, low-income housing, I have to speak against it.”
While hedging on their praise for Daley’s initiative, the religious council has endorsed and its member congregations have helped campaign for the proposed ordinance calling for 35,000 low-income units.
The congregations joined a recent citywide effort that sent 20,000 postcards to Chicago aldermen, urging them to pass the ordinance. It was proposed by affordable housing activists led by the Chicago Rehab Network.
Agreeing with the activists, the religious council disagrees with the city’s definition of affordable housing, beginning with the median family income it uses to determine what is affordable.
The Network contends that Chicago’s median income is $30,702, but the city uses a larger metropolitan (Cook, Du Page and McHenry Counties) area’s median income of $41,745 as a starting point to determine an affordable rent for low-income families.
As a result, the city has determined that $522 a month is affordable, while the Network says a Chicago family of four can only afford $386 a month.
Thirty percent of Chicago households fall into that category and must be of prime concern in creating jobs and affordable housing, the Network says. Its leaders contend the mayor’s new housing initiative doesn’t even keep up with the number of living units that the city knocks down-estimated at 40,000 every 10 years.
Auxiliary Bishop Placido Rodriguez attended the religious leaders’ press conference as a representative of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, head of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago and member of the religious council.
Having a home means more than having shelter, Rodriguez said: “The question of affordable housing is a question dealing with the human dignity of the person and the family.”
The women who briefly visited their lockers toward the end of the press conference did not speak during it. But their locker arrangements attested to the importance of dignity. They want to pay for the safekeeping, and they are charged locker rent of 50 cents a month.
