Jane Sickler tells her two teenage daughters “they can have a better life,” and it’s no wonder.
Homeless, jobless and burdened with medical problems, Sickler, 37, and her daughters spend their nights at a homeless shelter in Aurora. They live mostly among men, a majority troubled by mental illness or drug or alcohol dependency.
“It’s just like, `God, get me out of here,’ ” Sickler said. “And I go to family and friends’ homes and I just get more depressed.”
Sickler and her daughters, 14-year-old Ashley and 13-year-old Amanda, live at PADS, the Public Action to Deliver Shelter.
Late last month, there were four families with seven children among more than 120 people staying at PADS, the overnight, wintertime homeless shelter at Hesed House. Some nights, women and children account for up to 20 percent of PADS residents.
At Hesed House’s Transitional Living Center, a multiservice facility designed to end homelessness, 32 of 52 residents were children.
“It’s a face we have chosen to ignore so far, and I think we ignore it at great peril,” said Diane Nilan, PADS program director, referring to homeless children. “Unless something improves for them, we are guaranteeing another generation of homeless people.”
There were about 160,000 homeless people in Illinois, with about 45,000 in the collar counties, in 1996, the last time an estimate was made, said Matt Hanafee, executive director of the Chicago-based Illinois Coalition to End Homelessness. Of those, up to 30 percent were children, 40 percent were part of a homeless family unit and another 10 to 15 percent were single women.
The numbers of homeless served by Hesed House is growing. On Jan. 9, a record 154 people stayed at PADS.
“People are here longer, and they have less options of places to go,” Nilan said.
Hanafee estimated that the homeless population has been increasing about 5 percent a year.
“Homelessness is a growth industry, unfortunately, these days throughout the suburbs and throughout the state,” he said. “The major cause of that, obviously, is how fast housing costs are rising.”
When low-income people lack health insurance, are removed from welfare rolls, suffer mental illness or have drug or alcohol problems, high housing costs can mean the difference between having a home and being on the street.
“When you are paying so much for rent, you don’t have that safety net to get over a crisis, and that results in homelessness,” Hanafee said.
Hanafee estimated that about half the homeless work.
“We have a lot of $7-an-hour jobs in our economy right now,” he said. “We have no $7-an-hour housing … The economy is so good that the people who have higher paying jobs have bid up the price of housing.”
Nilan said other issues that can leave people homeless include chronic health problems, illiteracy, lack of transportation, the cost of day care, bad credit and the reluctance of employers to hire someone with a criminal record. the reluctance of employers to hire someone with a criminal record, chronic health problems, illiteracy, lack of transportation, the cost of day care and bad credit. She worries that the recent spike in utility costs will cause more homelessness.
She said federal public housing programs won’t accept families that include a member with a criminal history or credit problems.
“I don’t know a lot of people who are homeless who have good credit,” Nilan said.
Sickler, like most of the people at PADS, was left without a home by a series of problems.
At 16, she was a high school dropout who left home and married a man who “did not want to work, just sit around and collect unemployment.”
The marriage fell apart, and she ended up at a woman’s shelter, which she left with a friend to take a job at a Texas nursing home.
While in Texas, she met the father of her oldest child, Aaron, 17. After becoming pregnant, she returned home and, within a few years, met the father of her two daughters. They lived together, and during her pregnancies and Caesarean sections, she developed a thyroid problem that, without medicine, could kill her.
When Ashley was 2 1/2, Sickler left the girls’ father and moved into a shelter in Aurora. From there, she went to a Catholic Charities shelter in Chicago, where she stayed six months.
Then, for nearly five years, she lived in Chicago, paying for rent and other living expenses with welfare and, eventually, $156 a week in child support from the girls’ father. Medicaid covers her doctor bills.
In 1992, she moved to Sycamore to live with her father, but that didn’t work out. For the next six years or so, she lived on her own, with friends and, for three years, with the father of the girls. None of that lasted, and about 2 1/2 years ago, she ended up in PADS, where she stayed with Aaron while her girls lived with their father.
Aaron eventually moved in with friends on Aurora’s west side. He’s studying for his GED while working at a grocery. For about 18 months, she and the girls were living at Hesed’s transition center while she worked at an Aurora fast-food restaurant. While there, she stopped receiving $356 a month in welfare for Ashley, who has William’s syndrome, which causes mild mental retardation and developmental and language delays.
About a year ago, she lost her job. A job at another fast-food restaurant lasted only a couple of months. She went back to living with family and friends. Again, none of that worked, and around Thanksgiving, she ended up back at PADS, this time with her girls.
Over the years, she has earned her GED and some college credits, with the aim of becoming a teacher’s aide. For now, she looks for work, between running errands and taking the girls to school. When she applies for work, employers look askance at her address, because they know it’s a homeless shelter, she said.
Since leaving TLC, Amanda, a member of the 8th grade honor society, has struggled in school, Sickler said.
“We’ve been through a lot,” she said. “The kids have been through counseling and therapy. Their biggest fear is having others find out they are homeless and make fun of them.
“I don’t want people looking at me like I’m some kind of irresponsible, lazy, unfit mother, because I’m not. I don’t expect anyone to give me anything. All I want to do is do better for myself and do better for my children.”
Nilan said Sickler and the other homeless people at PADS are becoming part of “an underclass that are filling up our shelters.”
