More drug users contracting HIV, powerful new drugs that keep AIDS victims alive longer and skyrocketing rents are causing a crisis of homeless people with AIDS in Chicago, advocates say.
In response, the AIDS Foundation of Chicago has commissioned a housing study officials hope will generate support for more affordable housing for people with AIDS.
“The good news is that people are living longer,” said Mark Ishaug, executive director of the foundation, noting the powerful drug combinations now available. “But housing is so critical. Resources are not increasing.”
Ishaug said 32,000 Chicagoans have HIV–the virus that causes AIDS–or full-blown AIDS. About 5,500 of them cannot afford an apartment, he said, but fewer than 1,000 receive subsidized housing or a free bed.
Maryann Mason, director of the Mid-America Institute on Poverty in Chicago, said the population of AIDS victims has changed from predominantly white, middle-class gay men to drug users who are often poor and minorities.
Drug users now make up 50 percent of all new HIV cases, up from about one-third of all cases since the 1980s, said Thomas D’Aunno, an associate professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.
The reasons for that increase include the resurgence of heroin, which can be injected with needles that transmit HIV from one user to another, and the practice of women addicts trading sex for drugs, D’Aunno said.
Also, regentrification has led to higher rents, which leads to homelessness for the city’s poor. A 1999 study by the University of Illinois at Chicago found that city rents increased more than the cost of living during the 1990s, with the average monthly rent on the city’s West Side now at $618.
Ishaug said he hopes the foundation’s $50,000 study, scheduled to be done by the end of the year, will point out shortcomings in current services and will help attract money for more apartments and transitional housing.
Steven Rudolph, 39, said too many homeless addicts fall through the cracks because of a shortage of beds and treatment. A former drug user who has been clean for six years, Rudolph said he broke a 20-year habit while staying at a homeless shelter.
Now a caseworker at Lakefront SRO, a supportive housing center in the Uptown neighborhood, offering affordable housing to homeless, formerly homeless or low-income residents, Rudolph said addicts who are not in treatment don’t worry about AIDS. He said he never contracted the disease and did not use needles while using drugs (this paragraph as published has been corrected in this text).
“I didn’t think about (AIDS),” he said. “I didn’t care. When you drink or do drugs, you don’t care about that.”
