Hesed House, a homeless shelter in Aurora, is set to expand its family shelter space with help from a nearly $1.6 million state grant.
Family homelessness is up across the country, and Hesed House’s family shelter has been serving upwards of 140 family members at a time, according to Executive Director Joe Jackson. However, many of those families are housed off-site in hotels, as the family shelter can currently only hold about 59 men, women and children, he said.
The cost of those hotel rooms, even with negotiated lower rates, comes out to about $750,000 per year, Jackson said. Plus, the funding currently used to pay for those hotel rooms won’t be around forever, he said.
So, Hesed House is gearing up for a renovation and expansion project that’s set to roughly double its family shelter capacity. To help support the project, the city of Aurora previously applied for and recently received a roughly $1.6 million state grant, which the Aurora City Council voted to accept on Tuesday.
Not only will the project make the shelter bigger, which Jackson said is “drastically needed,” but the idea is to also make it better. For example, he said the project will be adding sensory rooms for children on the autism spectrum, a classroom for things like parenting classes and tutoring, a wheelchair lift for those with disabilities or mobility issues, a new computer lab, an isolation room to keep sick families apart from others and additional office space.
A staff report about the project, included with Tuesday’s City Council meeting agenda, said the expansion project will make sure that families and children will not be forced to survive on the streets and in the elements when experiencing homelessness, plus it will ensure those families have access “to safe, stable shelter and the myriad of life-changing services provided at Hesed House.”
“This shelter expansion is a critical step in the fight to end homelessness in the greater Aurora area,” staff said in the report.
The Aurora City Council accepting the state grant was “a big step” in the timeline of the project, Jackson said. Now, the nonprofit organization is looking to get a contract signed with a construction company by mid- to late-January, then construction is expected to take around 14 to 16 months, he said.
The roughly $1.6 million grant that is expected to pay for nearly all of the project’s cost came from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
Although Aurora is partnering with Hesed House to provide the state grant dollars, the city is not putting in any of its own funds, Aurora Community Services Director Chris Ragona said at Aurora City Council Finance Committee meeting on Oct. 30. Any additional money needed for the project will come from Hesed House, Jackson said at the time.
Around this time last year, Hesed House completed an expansion of its adult shelter that, similar to the coming expansion of the family shelter, roughly doubled its capacity. But one year later, that shelter again has a wait-list to get in, according to Jackson.
“It is not for a lack of effort by both the people staying here and our staff,” he said. “Over the last five years, we’ve had over 5,200 instances of either preventing homelessness or case managers directly housing individuals and households, and then there’s hundreds if not thousands more that did it with little to no case management.”
While Jackson said there were also other local “really great organizations” that are putting in the time and effort to address homelessness, all of that work is going towards just maintaining “as we stand today.” Continuing to expand shelters won’t solve homelessness, he said, as that will take help from politicians at all levels to address the affordable housing crisis.
Around 60% or 70% of the adults staying at Hesed House have a job, and some have multiple, but there’s just no place they can move to that’s affordable for them, according to Jackson. He said that those willing to move have been placed in housing as far away as Rockford or Wisconsin, since there’s “just nothing available” locally.
This is a national issue, Jackson said, and one he expects will come up during the midterm elections.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
