Finding the suburban homeless: A night with volunteers

Shortly after 9 p.m. Jessica Elbe organizes her team.

Fred Chin and Darlene Lundein grab clipboards with maps of the Northwest suburbs. Cedric Payne gathers an armful of care packages stocked with food, hygiene products and clothes.

All four bundle up in hats, coats and gloves. It's 33 degrees outside the Mount Prospect office of Northwest Compass, formerly CEDA Northwest.

As the group piles into Elbe's car, she knows the people they are looking for are out there. They just have to find them.

The group is part of more than 55 volunteers who set out on Wednesday night to comb North and Northwest suburban streets, looking for homeless people, providing services and counting their numbers to report back to the federal government. The count, done nationally every two years, helps officials determine how much funding they'll get and where it is needed to serve society's most vulnerable population.

In 2013 there were 151 homeless people found living on the streets of suburban Cook County. Nationwide the number was 610,042. The numbers do not include those taking sanctuary in shelters.

“The (true) number is much higher, no doubt,” said Sonia Ivanov, managing director at Northwest Compass, which is the dispatch center for this year's count.

A mix of social workers, volunteers and current or former homeless people gathered there earlier for training before heading out for the count.

“Tonight is about the hard-core homeless,” Ivanov says.

Maybe it would be easier to find homeless people on the streets if the weather were a little warmer, but that's not the point.

“We're trying to capture the most vulnerable population — the ones who really don't have any other option,” said Anna Lunceford, community liaison with the Alliance to End Homeless in Suburban Cook County.

Two on-duty police officers from Arlington Heights are among the counters. They represent the only suburban police department volunteering.

At 9:20 p.m., Elbe, a social worker at Northwest Compass, gets her group on the road. Payne acts as their guide to the secret spots where homeless people find shelter in the suburbs. He used to be homeless, but he has recently been living in a transitional housing unit.

“I'd never want to sleep outside on a night like this,” he says.

At 9:40 p.m., it starts to rain.

Elbe pulls into Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights, where homeless people often end up for a night.

There they find Corey, a 28-year-old man who has struggled with substance abuse issues and burned most of his bridges with friends and family because of it.

His girlfriend was also recently homeless, but she just found housing through another social service agency. She's sick, so Corey brought her in to the hospital to get checked out.

He just started a job at Mariano's and hopes he'll find housing soon.

Elbe gives him a care package and has him fill out a survey with his name and information so they can check in with him. Questions include, “Do you feel safe?” and “Have you ever been attacked while being on the street?”

It's time to move on.

Payne leads the group through church parking lots, behind abandoned buildings and past quiet parks, but no one is out.

“You have to find somewhere open 24 hours, somewhere with heat and a bathroom,” he says.

The next stop is a 24-hour McDonald's in Rolling Meadows.

A middle-aged man sits alone, hunched over his meal around 10 p.m. His jacket is full of holes, and he continues to wear it, even though the temperature inside McDonald's is comfortably warm.

He refuses to give his name and doesn't want help, from Elbe's group or anyone else. He swears when she tries to explain they are there to help.

“I can understand your frustration,” Elbe says calmly.

But when his responses move from angry to threatening, it's time to go.

“It's very common to have that kind of reaction,” Elbe said, shrugging it off. Many homeless people have undiagnosed mental illnesses, substance abuse or PTSD, she said.

“For a lot of people, their fear comes out as anger,” she says.

He didn't want to do the survey or take a free care package, but he'll still be counted among the homeless. Because of his threats, though, they will have to report him to police.

At 10:26 p.m., the group pulls up next to a dark van at the back of the Meijer parking lot in Rolling Meadows. No one is in it, but the back of a parking lot is a common place for people to sleep in their cars, Payne said.

The next few hours don't turn up much. It starts to rain again at 10:45 p.m.

“No one is going to be under a bridge right now in this weather,” Elbe says after a check of a Route 53 underpass turns up empty.

They make a loop through the parking lot of Harper College's quiet campus. A maintenance employee on duty says that if they see homeless people on campus they tell them to leave or they will have to contact police.

The next parking lot to check is Wal-Mart's. The national chain allows people to park in their lots overnight, no questions asked, making it a haven for RV drivers and homeless alike.

That's where they find Denise and Ruth, a mother and daughter in their 50s and 70s, respectively, who are living in their car.

It's packed full of all their belongings, serving as a closet, a bed and a home for the two women.

They were accepted for Section 8 housing but haven't yet been able to find an apartment where they can use the voucher.

There is a list of Section 8 apartments online, but the Internet, and the knowledge to use it, are all luxuries for Denise and Ruth.

“If you don't know how to navigate the system, it's very difficult,” Elbe says.

After midnight, it's time to circle back to the Meijer parking lot and check that abandoned van again.

Payne knocks on the window and finds Bob Hart, a 53-year-old Army veteran who has been living in his car for years.

Hart — whose last address was in Schaumburg before a cycle of unemployment, health issues and unaffordable housing put him on the streets — was part of another team of volunteers looking for homeless people in Glenview earlier in the night. When his job was done as a volunteer, the team dropped him back at home, to his van.

When he heard the knock on his window he was just glad it wasn't the police.

“Technically it's illegal to sleep in a car, but I'm too poor to be a legal person anymore,” Hart says.

As long as no one complains he won't get in trouble, but sometimes the cops will ask him to move somewhere else.

“I don't park in the same place every night because I don't want to get on anyone's nerves,” he says. He moves around between a number of 24-hour grocery stores in the Northwest suburbs. “If there are other cars there, you can kind of blend in.”

He knows firsthand that it's not just hard to climb out of homelessness.

“It's impossible,” he said.

A small disability pension from the military helps pay for gas and insurance on his van, which holds everything he owns, including the small cushions he sleeps on and plenty of blankets.

The last time Hart slept in a real bed was around Christmas when he stayed at a friend's house to take care of the dog.

The cold doesn't bother him as much as a muggy summer night that makes it impossible to sleep.

“Lack of heat can always be cured with more blankets,” he said.

There are also more shelters and PADs sites open during the winter months, meaning fewer people are out on the streets. Hart said the shelters often have too many rules and too little privacy for his taste.

After years on the streets, the homeless people of the Northwest suburbs have become their own community.

Every Sunday during the summer, Hart helps host a cookout for other homeless people in Recreation Park in Arlington Heights. One church brings the food, another brings the grill and Hart does the cooking.

“We have to help each other out. If we don't, nobody else is going to help us,” he says.

Around 2 a.m., it's time to go back to the Northwest Compass location on Northwest Highway. Elbe's group found six people in total, though not everyone wanted help. That was the highest number among the groups of volunteers who were searching from Evanston to Schaumburg.

In total, the groups found 21 homeless people on the streets Wednesday night, not including the 15 homeless people, like Hart, who helped with the search.

It will take months for the full national count to come out, but officials said even that number won't paint the whole picture.

“That number is underestimated, for sure,” Ivanov said.

It won't include the people who found shelters to sleep in; those places will do their own count for the government.

It doesn't include people who found a couch to sleep on just for the night. It doesn't include people who were sleeping in forest preserves because the volunteers didn't have jurisdiction to search there.

It doesn't include the people they just couldn't find.