'Being homeless seems so surreal'
February 11, 2007
Chicago Sun-Times
BY MONROE ANDERSON 

Moving day for Jamille Posey came just in time. The 34-year-old mother and her 11-year-old son were on the verge of eviction from Lambb House because they had been in the temporary shelter longer than the three-month period the city's regulations permit. Had she not found an apartment that she could afford, the two would have been homeless. Again.

For the last year, Posey and her son, Cassius, have lived a nomadic life, moving from one place to the next. So when she got the good news last week, she could barely wait to share it with her only child. ''I pulled out the keys. He just fell in my arms and said, 'Oh, I'm so happy.' ''

It may have been a happy day for him, but it was a bittersweet moment for her. ''I hate that my son had to go through this,'' she said.

Last summer was the hardest for Posey, if not for her son. That's when their home was her elderly mother's '94 Buick Century. ''That's when I knew I was a failure,'' Posey said. ''Or at least I thought I was a failure.''

For two months, she parked at 63rd and the lakefront, staying awake all night to watch over her sleeping son. During the day, Posey napped while Cassius played at the 63rd Street Beach. When he needed to go to the restroom, she would take him to a fast-food restaurant, making sure to buy something so he could go, unchallenged. Every other day they'd visit her 67-year-old mother in the nursing home, sneaking a quick bath before returning to the streets.

Their stay at Lambb House presented other concerns. Studying was difficult for Cassius in a shelter with one distraction after the next: babies crying, children laughing and playing, adults talking.

''His grades have gone down quite a bit,'' she said, concerned, adding that Cassius was also ashamed to let his sixth-grade classmates know where he stayed. To shield him from humiliation, after school she picked him up, driving around a short distance before taking him to the Far South Side shelter, which was just two blocks away.

Posey and her son are only two of the 21,078 homeless people who Ed Shurna estimates reside in Chicago. This is the time of the year when we are forced to ponder their plight.

''People become more aware of homelessness when it's cold,'' Shurna, executive director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, told me during an interview last week on one of those sub-zero days. But in reality, he said, the problem is ongoing and unrelenting. The fastest-growing population of homeless in Chicago is families, now at 40 percent. There are more than 11,000 families doubled up in housing because they can't afford to pay rent and have nowhere else to go, Shurna said.

Thirty years ago, every American family had somewhere to go. The few homeless people then were middle-age men with serious drinking problems.

Changes came in the 1980s. The Reagan Revolution slashed funding for housing the mentally ill as one of its earliest onslaughts in its war on the poor. Under the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations, federal assistance to those who need it most trickled down the least. As the federal government was getting out of the business of caring for low-income people who need housing, big business was busy outsourcing overseas the jobs that paid enough to cover the rent. Housing expenses have outpaced salaries in our growing service economy, and those without college educations now find themselves in danger of being economically challenged.

Small wonder that this decades-long practice of voodoo economics adds up to homelessness blossoming across America, blighting our nation.

Posey was forced into the ranks of the homeless a year ago when her landlord raised the rent to $650 from $350 a month on her two-bedroom apartment in west Hyde Park. She hopes that after completing a computer training course next month at South Shore's Featherfist, a community organization the coalition works with in aiding homeless people, she'll land a job somewhere as an administrative assistant. She hopes to make enough to eventually move up from the South Side studio apartment she has just rented to something larger. But, for now, she's grateful she finally has a place to call home.

''Being homeless seems so surreal,'' she said. ''You wake up and you got a child looking at you like 'You're supposed to help me.' I dropped the ball.''