The quiet, tree-lined residential streets along Fullerton near Lincoln certainly don’t look like they’re part of a dangerous neighborhood, but that’s what some local residents claim they’ve become. The residents say the source of the problem is the Lincoln Park Community Shelter, and on June 4 four of them filed a suit to shut it down.
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The highly regarded, not-for-profit homeless shelter, which has been around a lot longer than many of its loudest critics, is funded and operated by parishioners from four mainstream Lincoln Park churches: Lincoln Park Presbyterian, Saint Paul’s United Church of Christ, Church of Our Savior Episcopal, and Saint Clement Catholic Church. “The shelter began as a warming center in 1985,” says Reverend Jeffrey Doane, pastor of Lincoln Park Presbyterian. “We’ve had no serious complaints over the years.” He says the shelter’s two sites–one in his church, at 600 W. Fullerton, the other a block away in Saint Paul’s, at 2335 N. Orchard–have taken in thousands of clients and turned around the lives of hundreds of people. He and other supporters also say that the shelter is well run and safe, that both sites are supervised day and night, that there’ve been no serious crimes linked to any clients, that unruly clients are asked to leave. The shelter’s operators recently received awards from Mayor Daley and from the Lincoln Park Chamber of Commerce.
A spokesman for the police department, Robert Cargie, says the police have no evidence linking any of the shelter’s clients to the three serious charges above. He says no arrests have been made in any of the cases, and there are no suspects.
Caught in the middle is the alderman, the 43rd Ward’s Vi Daley, a nonideological mainstream Democrat who generally votes however Mayor Daley (no relation) wants her to and rarely has much to say in City Council debates. (She didn’t return my calls.) Some of the shelter’s backers, particularly Saint Clement’s, are powerful institutions in her ward, but she also has supporters among the shelter’s opponents, including one of her predecessors as alderman, Billy Singer.
City officials now have to decide whether to immediately close the shelter for operating without a proper permit, which a judge might order them to do. Later this summer the Zoning Board of Appeals will have to review the shelter’s application for a special-use permit–something neither Alderman Daley nor Mayor Daley has taken a stand on–and decide whether to approve it.
