It’s difficult to prioritize voting when you’re struggling with immediate needs, like housing. But advocates say it’s important to mobilize, especially with an administration targeting government spending.
By Gabriella Gladney
A voter casts their vote in the 2023 Mayoral Election at the Conway Center at Columbia College Chicago in Chicago’s South Loop on Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023. (Talia Sprague/for City Bureau)
Wayne Richard was experiencing homelessness when he first met organizers from the Chicago Coalition to End Homelessness. Now, as the group’s Director of Organizing, he returns to shelters like the ones he once relied on, empowering people to make their voices heard through voting and civic engagement.
“It was clear how to vote when I was housed, and once I became homeless, it became unclear,” Richard said. “And with all of the different stresses that I had for my day to day, it was not a priority in a way that it would be otherwise.
“It’s very interesting how your connection to community and citizenship shifts when you’re no longer in touch with the elements of your life that gave you those things,” Richard said.
But organizing amongst such a vulnerable population is often an uphill battle, organizers told City Bureau.
There are approximately 55,637 people of voting age in Chicago experiencing homelessness, according to the 2024 homeless report from Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. CCH expands their definition of homelessness to include those who stay with friends or family members, making their estimate larger than the city’s official Point-In-Time report.
Service providers said there’s often not enough time, money or resources available to help clients vote. For people struggling with housing insecurity, lack of personal documents, confusion around the voting process and other daily concerns make it difficult to prioritize voting, advocates said.
Advocates are trying to fight that apathy. In the fall, service providers engaged clients through organized registration events partnered with city officials. Others went into shelters to distribute and collect voter registration forms, ensuring they were submitted to city officials. Many also provided transportation to the polls for shelter residents, making the voting process more accessible.
“Their vote directly affects how they are served, and who determines or lobbies for them,” said Tia Singleton, a case worker at Matthew House, a homelessness support and outreach center.
The complications of voting when you’re homeless
Nationwide data on homeless voter registration and turnout is sparse.
The National Coalition for the Homeless reports that 33% of eligible voters with an income below $20,000 cast ballots in the 2022 midterms. In Illinois, 15% of voters in the 2020 presidential election earned under $25,000 in household income, according to an AP survey of nearly 2,900 likely voters in Illinois.
Legally, there have been important strides to defend the voting rights of homeless individuals.
The landmark New York court case Pitts v. Black established that eligible voters residing in non-traditional locations could not be denied registration to vote. In Fischer v. Stout, the Alaska Supreme Court affirmed that residency requirements should not be a barrier to voter participation. The Illinois’ Bill of Rights for the Homeless Act was adopted in 2013, further codifying protections for homeless people to vote, register to vote and “receive documentation necessary to prove identity for voting without discrimination due to his or her housing status” in the state.
People eat during an annual Thanksgiving dinner at St. John's Episcopal Church in Chicago on Thursday, November, 28, 2024. (Joel Angel Juarez/for City Bureau)
New voters in Illinois need two pieces of ID to register, CCH legislative director Niya Kelly said. People experiencing homelessness can get a free copy of their birth records through local county clerk’s offices. People then can use that to obtain other legal IDs, such as a social security card, as part of the process to secure a state ID card, according to CCH.
Documentation from a homelessness services provider can serve as the second form of ID, Kelly said.
“If you're living at a shelter, if you're working with a drop-in center, if you're working with a provider, they are able to write a letter and say this person is permitted to use this address as their address they can vote from. Then you can bring that with you and that can serve as one piece of identification,” Kelly said.
People experiencing homelessness are often already registered to vote, whether they registered at a prior address or when applying for entitlement programs. Not having a permanent or updated address can make it challenging to determine their polling location, although those staying in shelters or connected to community centers have an easier time, Kelly said. These locations also serve as mailing addresses for many unhoused people.
St. John’s Episcopal Church in Irving Park was once a part of Hands to Help Ministries, a collaborative organization geared towards ending homelessness on the Northwest Side. As a member, they allowed unhoused community members to use the church as a mailing address, Interim Rector Meghan Murphy-Gill said. The collective ended operations in 2021, but unhoused neighbors can still collect mail there and join an annual Thanksgiving dinner open to anyone with nowhere else to go, Murphy-Gill said.
“In 1983, members of St. John’s noticed that many of our neighbors had no one to be with on Thanksgiving Day,” said Andria Anderson, the coordinator of the Thanksgiving event. “We invited them to gather at our church for both food and conversation and we've done so every year since.”
People eat during an annual Thanksgiving dinner at St. John's Episcopal Church in Chicago on Thursday, November, 28, 2024. (Joel Angel Juarez/for City Bureau)
Matthew’s House in Bronzeville also serves as a mailing address for its clients. Kenneth Robinson is among those who have benefitted from that kind of support in order to vote.
Robinson, 52, told City Bureau he sleeps on the train while awaiting placement from the city’s housing lottery. He first came to Matthew's House over 20 years ago.
“Part of my life involved incarceration, so I've been in and out,” he said. “[Matthew’s House] has been a home to me. I came here starting off as a volunteer, cutting hair, helping, serving food in the early 2000s. I went from giving a hand to receiving a hand. But I mean, it's always been like home.”
Voting this year presented no issues, he said. Everyone who receives mail at Matthew’s House votes at the Martin Luther King Community Service Center on Cottage Grove. This election cycle, inequality was the issue he paid the most attention to, he said.
“We're looking at a system that, of course, is rigged. All the promises that have been made have been made strictly to the people that are well off. There’s nowhere in the [plans] for the little people like us,” Robinson said.
Shelter clients watched the evening news regularly and had access to YouTube and radios, so they all felt informed by the issues, Robinson said. “We're not cut off. We're not distant from the world.”
However, in Robinson’s conversations about the election with other shelter members, he saw that people were mostly disillusioned about lack of meaningful change to their circumstances.
“The main thing is people are so confused. People are caught up, mainly on the financial side of life,” Robinson said. “A lot of us don't even get a chance to grow old, you know what I'm saying? We work hard, fingers to the bone, to only receive nothing.”
Still, voting in November was a way for him to feel “a part of society again,” Robinson said.
Niya Kelly, legislative director for Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.
Others have a much harder time accessing information and figuring out how to vote, advocates said. Some may not meet the requirements to stay at a shelter, or have family who allow them to use their address, Kelly said. Not having access to such services can make it difficult to know where to begin, she said.
“It's easy for me as someone who is housed to be able to find my voting precinct because I have access to technology, or I have access to a community that would be able to help guide me. But if I'm someone who may be transient, it can be hard for me to figure out where my polling place is,” Kelly said.
People struggling with housing may also have a hard time hanging onto their important documents, such as IDs. Many people living on the streets have jobs and leave for work during the day, Kelly said. Encampment sweeps can have devastating consequences.
“They come back and all of their documentation, their birth certificates, their other legal documents that they may have, have been thrown away in a sweep,” Kelly said.
‘It gives them a voice’
Even if other obstacles to voting are eliminated, apathy among homeless Chicagoans can sometimes be the biggest barrier.
Housing Forward, a shelter network serving Cook County’s west suburbs, can serve as a model for how to engage unhoused voters. Patricia Stokes, a senior director and member of the voter education committee, helped plan four events before the November election for clients of their shelters.
In suburban Oak Park and Broadview, city officials assisted in the registration process. They walked residents through address changes, ID updates and what to expect during the voting process, Stokes said.
Their goal was to “ensure that the people that we serve had an opportunity to ask questions [and] certainly to understand their rights,” she said.
The events also provided a safe environment for clients to express their hesitancy about voting, and hear other viewpoints. Stokes recounted a discussion with a young man who was adamant about not believing in politics. Through their back and forth, Stokes felt he gained a new perspective.
“I do try to encourage people to think of themselves as having more power than they believe that they do and that their voice really does matter. And it's through their voice and the collective voices of others who may share in their interests, that change is made,” Stokes said.
Despite falling short in last March’s election, the Bring Chicago Home campaign also included people who are or have been homeless, organizers said. The ballot measure would have raised a one-time tax on real estate transfers for purchases over $1 million, with proceeds supporting homelessness prevention efforts in the city.
Alongside visiting shelters to talk to people, campaign leaders distributed voter registration forms, collected completed forms, and delivered them to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, Richard said. They also coordinated rides to polling places and encouraged volunteers from shelters to participate in door-to-door canvassing, where they shared their personal stories with potential voters to highlight the urgent need for change.
“Hearing the stories actually helps people understand the incremental things that can happen that can lead to homelessness, and help begin to identify the similarities,” said Richard. “A lot of us are a paycheck away from being [homeless]. So that's a very different narrative.”
CCH continued their offerings of rides to the polls and voter registration form delivery during the 2024 elections season, Richard said.
“People tend to think that people experiencing homelessness are unorganized, and so I think sometimes [our work] goes under the radar. To the extent we can make it very visible, I think it shifts the game,” Richard said.
Locals and some homeless neighbors sit on public parks in the city on a sunny fall day in Chicago. (Darryl Holliday/City Bureau)
While the rights of homeless individuals are safeguarded on paper, recent Supreme Court decisions like Grants Pass v Johnson point to a rocky future for national protections, Kelly said.
“The conservative members of the court decided that even if there isn't a shelter to go to, that if someone is sleeping in the in public, that local municipalities have the power to be able to arrest and find people who are experiencing homelessness, driving them further into the margins and further into debt,” Kelly said.
“I think right now, because of the Supreme Court's decision…there is a direct correlation between the [Trump] presidency and the criminalization of people experiencing homelessness.”
Service providers also are preparing for how conservative leadership may affect their clients, Singleton said. President Donald Trump’s campaign promises to cut government spending with the help of tech-billionaire Elon Musk has left providers worried that programs helping their clients will be cut, she said.
“A lot of times, the first thing politicians go after is social service programs,” Singleton said.
Indeed, mere days into his second presidency, Trump and his administration directed a federal funding freeze stopping all grants, public loans and more, sparking panic among local nonprofits that rely on that money for critical work supporting vulnerable residents. A federal judge blocked that order, but some money has remained in gridlock as that same judge determined that the president hasn’t fully lifted the freeze as ordered.
“I’m absolutely concerned, considering that we already don’t have enough. Who’s in office—whether that’s local or national—determines who’s going to receive funding,” Singleton said . “A lot of times, homeless people are at the end or the bottom of the food chain.”
Locally, appointing a Chief Homelessness Officer in City Hall was a good start to addressing the issue, Richard said. But money continues to be an issue.
“I think it always comes down to resources. And that's where the city's challenge is, right? I think the administration did a good job of setting stakeholders around the table to talk about what's possible, but all those things have to be funded,” Richard said.
If more unhoused people were involved in the city’s politics, priorities would change, Richard said.
As the housing crisis deepens, ensuring unhoused individuals have access to the ballot box is essential—not only to uphold their rights but to center their plight in the broader fight for housing justice, advocates said.
“There are so many things that contribute to being homeless,” Singleton said. “And so if they don't participate in that voting process, then a lot of times, they're not heard, they're not represented. It gives them a voice.”
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