Volunteers help migrants in search for permanent housing as Chicago struggles to keep up

When volunteers found there was no way of keeping the makeshift shelter in Pilsen open despite the need for spaces to house thousands of migrants living in police stations across Chicago, their priorities shifted.

They needed to find a way to help the asylum-seekers find permanent housing without the city’s assistance to ensure they wouldn’t go back to a station or the streets.

The volunteers had a little over a month and more than 100 residents, mostly families, who needed to be rehoused before the shelter closed. “It seemed impossible at first,” said Cynthia Nambo, a volunteer with Todos Para Todos, the group that operated the shelter.

But they did it.

With the help of the Chicago Low-Income Housing Trust Fund, and some without financial help at all, volunteers from the Pilsen shelter placed most of the residents in apartments right before the shelter closed in early September.

As Chicago infrastructure buckles under the weight of thousands of migrants who have arrived over the past year, city officials had pointed to resettlement — moving migrants from temporary to permanent housing — as their golden ticket to ensuring people have roofs over their heads. But the hundreds of asylum-seekers arriving daily from the southern border on buses and planes are overwhelming Chicago’s efforts.

Denver and New York are also struggling to handle mass numbers of migrants, and Chicago is the only sanctuary city that has pointed to resettlement as the primary solution to put them on a path to self-sufficiency. But there are not enoughto rent to keep up with the rate at whichpeople are arriving,leaving volunteers to fill the gaps.