Chicago’s homeless prepare to cast votes for mayor

Chicago’s runoff election for mayor on Tuesday pits front-runner Mayor Rahm Emanuel against Cook County Commissioner Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, with both candidates scrambling across town to convince voters that they should be at the helm of the Windy City.

Emanuel and Garcia have visited schools, union halls and other standard campaign stops. But as is so often case, both have ignored one voting demographic: the homeless.

Chicago has about 138,000 homeless individuals in its population of 2.7 million, according to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. While the homeless face obstacles to casting their ballots, many vote, though estimates of many vote in Chicago are unavailable.

William “Willie” Barnes, 64, is registered and plans to vote, one of the 10 percent of America’s 1.6 million homeless people who do so every year, according to estimates by the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Barnes lost his job as a truck driver several years ago and slipped into homelessness. He and his wife now live in a tent on the side of the Dan Ryan Expressway near Chicago’s downtown. A blue and white “Build a better Chicago” sign, the kind that appeared at public works projects after Emanuel became mayor in May 2011, props up their temporary shelter.

He knows who will get his vote.

“I ain’t got nothing to do but think, and I think about this a lot,” Barnes said. “I think I am going to vote for Emanuel. I know we are in rough times, and although we think it is rough, it can always get rougher. We need Emanuel because he’s been in there already. He can handle the pressure.”

Polls suggest Chicago voters agree with Barnes and have cooled on Garcia since he garnered enough votes to force a runoff. Emanuel had the support of 58 percent of respondents, compared with Garcia’s 30 percent, according to a Chicago Tribune poll conducted in late March.

Mark Brown, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist who covers homelessness, said the homeless and near homeless, despite their numbers, haven’t factored into candidates’ strategies. “I don’t see any campaign in Chicago reaching out for the homeless vote,” he said.

In the 20th century, however, these voters played a key role in the once notoriously crooked Chicago political scene. The Democratic machine used to pull the homeless to the polls with promises of money or alcohol, he said.

Today there’s no evidence that the homeless vote early and often (as various Chicagoans are said to have quipped), but as recipients of public assistance and frequent targets of police harassment, the homeless have a stake in who runs their city’s government.

Emanuel's administration, for instance, has made deep cuts to public mental health care, services on which many living on the streets depend.

As for what homeless voters feel, Brown said they share many concerns with the rest of the city but with “perhaps a greater focus on crime and public health.”

The homeless’ understanding of politics echoes that of their fellow Chicagoans’.

Many in the city still resent Emanuel’s shuttering of dozens of schools in 2013 to fill a budget gap. And community activists say the closings put children in crime-ridden neighborhoods at risk by forcing them to walk through areas controlled by rival gangs.

Renard Parrish, 48, who sleeps most nights on Chicago’s L train, told Al Jazeera in February that he resents Emanuel’s school policy. “I voted for Garcia … I think he has better ideas. I didn’t see any need for those schools to be closed,” he said of his vote in the initial round of voting. “They were already talking about kids going to dangerous territory.”

Still, he would like to see both candidates take a more direct role in the lives of the homeless. “I hope we could have an advocate that will speak for us, come and help us get housing.”

Illinois’ Homeless Bill of Rights protects Barnes’ and Parrish’s right to vote. Signed into law by then-Gov. Pat Quinn in 2013, it allows homeless people with two forms of ID to list a homeless shelter as an address when registering. Barnes votes in the city’s 11th Ward.  

“Some states just make it harder to register to vote,” although all U.S. citizens do have the right, said Ed Shurna, the executive director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.

He said that survival, not voting, is the top priority for most homeless who live day to day, although his organization does help the homeless register.

While he said that Emanuel’s administration has made some strides in helping homeless youth, Shurna doesn’t see a stark contrast with Garcia on issues affecting the city’s poorest.

“I don’t have any sense if one candidate or the other is going to make any difference,” Shurna added. Appealing to the homeless, he said, is not a priority for the candidates.

“I don’t know of either candidate ever going to a big shelter saying, ‘We’ll make it easier to vote,’” he said.