Most mornings I walk into work without giving my surroundings a second thought. Probably not a good quality for someone in commercial property management, but then I was never much of an over-achiever.
This week, though, I noticed something different. On Tuesday there was a white plastic lump propped up against the windows of the lobby of the Chicago Federal Center. Now, I'm used to seeing people out on the plaza - public buildings inevitably attract protesters and demonstrations. Redress of grievances and all that. Friday mornings AmeriCorps does calisthenics, neat rows of khaki and red doing push ups on granite in front of the Post Office that Mies van Der Rohe built. But this white lump was neither a newly minted undergraduate nor a Palestinian sympathizer. It was a person, a homeless woman specifically. I see far fewer homeless than you would expect in a city the magnitude of Chicago. I've seen many more in New York and Mexico City, and homelessness in Los Angeles is so pervasive it's practically an ethnicity.
The image of this person stayed in the back of my head for the rest of the day, and when I left for the evening, I looked over across the plaza and saw her still there. Every evening this week she was there, same place, folded over on one of the granite benches. So on Thursday when I ran into one of the guards, taking a smoke break in front of the building, I mentioned the visitor. "Have you noticed that woman out there?"
"Oh yeah, sure. We pay attention to what goes on around the building. Actually, a federal police officer went out there to talk to her, try and get her to move."
"Oh yeah?" I asked, curious. "What happened?"
"Nothing. I guess there's nothing we can do to get her out of here." That last statement broke my heart a little bit. I don't know why I would expect a guard in the federal building to have any compassion for a homeless woman, but I guess somewhere inside of my jaded heart I do.
"She says she's there to protest. They came and took her house. It's tied up in court, and she has lawyers fighting them. But she won't live in a regular house until she gets a ruling. It's her way of protesting, I guess."
I don't know how true any of that really is. The brief and confusing conversation I had with this woman made little sense, but based on what I know about the root causes of homelessness, I'd wager that she's living on the plaza in front of the federal building not to protest some perceived injustice, but because she lacks access to the resources that could take her off the street. With over 20 federal agencies located in the Chicago Federal Center, including Health and Human Services, Social Security and Housing and Urban Development, you would think that some middle manager somewhere would have realized that an opportunity to do community outreach was right in front of them. I realize that at the federal level these agencies don't do much front-line service provision. I guess I just wish that there was some way for a homeless woman, an American citizen, to get something more than a hassle from her government.
Image via miniwheatz007
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