Emily Krisciunas and Kathy Niedorowski lead Chicago Funders Together to End Homelessness, a collaborative of more than 30 Chicago area grantmakers working to end homelessness.
More than five years ago, a group of grassroots leaders unified around a shared vision: a vision to end homelessness for thousands of families across Chicago. That vision, shaped by people most impacted by homelessness, became Bring Chicago Home. On March 19, Chicago voters have the power to help make this vision a reality.
Bring Chicago Home presents our city with a unique opportunity to invest more than $100 million every year—$1 billion over the next decade—in what we know works to end homelessness: permanent housing. Bring Chicago Home was born out of the urgent and ever-growing need to address our city’s housing and homelessness crisis in a meaningful way. Crucially, it would create a new vehicle to address the primary driver of homelessness in our city: the lack of safe, stable, affordable housing.
Chicago Funders Together to End Homelessness (CFTEH), the organization we are honored to lead, is a collaborative of local grantmakers. Our foundation members invest more than $30 million annually to address homelessness, supporting essential interventions like emergency shelter, transitional housing, and wrap-around services. Beyond that, CFTEH has awarded nearly $3 million over the last year alone to support advocacy, community organizing, and narrative change efforts throughout the region, including Bring Chicago Home.
CFTEH’s strategy centers racial equity and housing justice— an acknowledgment that:
- housing is a human right,
- that homelessness is perpetuated by systemic racism and exclusionary housing policies,
- and that the scale of any intervention should be proportional to the scale of the injustice.
Through our work, we focus on promoting more equitable housing policy, aligning public and private resources, and shifting power to communities most impacted by homelessness.
For years, the City of Chicago has directed far less than other major cities to end homelessness. Moreover, the resources directed by the city are often inflexible and narrowly focused on important but short-term responses like emergency shelter and outreach, which support people experiencing literal homelessness but not the tens of thousands of people living doubled up, couch surfing, or living under the threat of violence. Bring Chicago Home presents us with an opportunity to restructure and make more progressive the Real Estate Transfer Tax, legally dedicating the increased and far more flexible revenue to create permanent affordable housing for people and families experiencing many forms of housing instability.
As we lead CFTEH, we have the privilege of listening every day to people who know more than we do about how to end homelessness: people with lived expertise, case managers, healthcare workers, advocates, and community organizers. Last spring, we hosted a series of listening sessions with these experts to understand their top priorities for the incoming Mayor.
The group quickly aligned around two priorities: 1) A new, senior-level official in the Mayor’s Office to quarterback the city’s efforts to end homelessness; and 2) A new, dedicated revenue stream to significantly expand access to permanent housing. We weren’t surprised. Through our work with peer cities, these two interconnected recommendations are routinely cited as essential to unlocking progress around ending homelessness.
To that end, CFTEH is proud to be funding the city’s first-ever Chief Homelessness Officer role, and to have joined Mayor Brandon Johnson and many of our partners last fall as he signed an Executive Order codifying this new position. We are also proud to be enthusiastic supporters of Bring Chicago Home. For four years, we have supported the campaign’s efforts to build community power, deepen public and political will to end homelessness, and secure a dedicated revenue source from the city.
We know that homelessness is solvable with permanent housing, and that the way to create permanent housing at a sustainable scale is with significantly more resources from the public sector. We know that for the city’s new Chief Homelessness Officer to be effective, they will need new, flexible, expanded public sector resources at their disposal. And we know that many advocates, organizers, providers, and funders—including us—who have stood behind Bring Chicago Home for many years, will partner closely with the city to ensure both public accountability and also the strategic, efficient, equitable use of these funds.
To be sure, opponents will continue to criticize and litigate the Bring Chicago Home effort, arguing that a more progressive RETT will be catastrophic to local commercial real estate development. More accurately, the progressive structure would bring Chicago’s Real Estate Transfer Tax into greater parity with many of its peer cities, generate revenue for new construction while creating new jobs, and connect thousands of Chicagoans to permanent housing. We invite groups opposed to this transformative opportunity into dialogue with CFTEH and with people most impacted by homelessness about how Bring Chicago Home can do two things at once—ensure that far fewer Chicagoans are sleeping on the street and living doubled up, while generating positive economic impact for the city, too.
As we approach the election tomorrow, we are reminded of a piece in The Atlantic in which journalist Annie Lowrey wrote: “America insists on repeating this lesson over and over again, never really learning it: no amount of private initiative or donor generosity can or will ever do what government can.” It is our tremendous honor to lead Chicago Funders Together to End Homelessness, but no amount of generosity or ingenuity by a funder collaborative or a single foundation will ever come close to realizing the potential in front of us through Bring Chicago Home.
