Northwest suburbs teaming up for homeless outreach
Municipalities across the Northwest suburbs plan to split the cost of a social worker who would provide street outreach to homeless individuals, under a two-year pilot program set to launch in January.
As many as 10 towns in the upstart Northwest Consortium on Homelessness would contract with Evanston-based social services organization Connections for the Homeless, which would provide a full-time case manager to spend time in each community and connect people with services.
Social workers employed by local governments in Arlington Heights, Buffalo Grove, Des Plaines, Elk Grove Village, Hoffman Estates, Mount Prospect, Palatine, Rolling Meadows, Schaumburg and Wheeling have been meeting monthly over the past year to devise a more coordinated homeless outreach response than what they have now.
Officials in Arlington Heights, who have led the regional effort to get counterparts to the table, have commitments from about a half dozen towns to ink agreements to equally split the $112,000 annual cost.
The pilot program is outgrowth of debate last year in Arlington Heights over a proposed ban on sleeping or camping on public property. A divided village board last October rejected the ordinance, but village staff even before that convened the regional work group on homelessness.
Social workers and police talked about their experiences on the job, identified gaps in the system and unmet needs, and came up with a service concept where they think they can work together, said Arlington Heights Village Manager Randy Recklaus.
“Being able to coordinate between communities, but also having that automatic connection between the not-for-profit sector and the municipal sector I think is really something that you’re not seeing, at least in the Northwest suburbs, in this way,” Recklaus said.
Under the proposal, the shared case manager would spend time engaging with homeless individuals in each community in an attempt to connect them with opportunities for housing/shelter, benefits, health services, employment and other support.
The manager, who would have office space at village halls, would also provide training and assistance to municipal staff.
The increased outreach comes as cases of homelessness have been trending upward since the pandemic, now at a record high of 1,380 in the North suburbs of Cook County, according to the Alliance to End Homelessness in Suburban Cook County.
Calls to Northwest Central Dispatch for police response in 2025 tallied 102 cases mentioning homelessness in Mount Prospect, 75 in Arlington Heights and 62 in Palatine.
“There is a little bit more there than maybe people realize as far as the level of contacts that are happening in our community, specifically in the Northwest,” said Darren Brown, Arlington Heights’ social worker who has led the homelessness consortium effort.
Surveys conducted by social workers found many homeless individuals are not on waiting lists for housing, which Brown said is a motivating factor to improve case management services.
The new case manager would be tasked with conducting housing assessments on the streets and entering names on agency wait lists.
“Some of these barriers can be addressed meaningfully if someone’s spending the time and engaging with folks,” he said.
cplacek@dailyherald.com