CV NEWS FEED // Chicago city officials have ignored offers from the Archdiocese of Chicago to house migrants for free on church properties, and continued to rent out private spaces, according to local reports.
The archdiocese has more than sixty unused spaces including schools, buildings, and churches, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. According to the news outlet, the archdiocese has offered “more than dozen of these locations to the city,” but “City Hall, on the other hand, has yet to agree on any such offers from the archdiocese, instead renting private shelter spaces at high costs.”
One such offered space was a closed school that can house “dozens of asylum-seekers, saving the village potentially millions of dollars in rent,” the Sun-Times reported:
Of the 23 shelters the city uses to house migrants, many are in city-owned or Chicago Park District buildings. But these sites hold only around 2,300 of the 11,400 migrants in shelters, leaving the vast majority in private properties the city is paying tens of millions of dollars to use, a Sun-Times analysis shows.
The closed school has been contracted for use, according to the Sun-Times, as costs continue to rise, and because “migrants were staying at a [local] hotel and a YMCA at a cost of about $67,000 a month, according to a village spokesman.”
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CatholicVote previously reported that in January, a Chicago city councilman suggested “creating a sign-up sheet for wealthy individuals to migrants in their homes as a solution to the Chicago area’s ongoing illegal immigration crisis.”
Talks between the archdiocese and city officials about potentially suitable buildings have been ongoing since 2022, according to the Sun-Times. The chief assets officer for the archdiocese, Eric Wollan, wrote to the city officials in October of last year, requesting for the city to “avoid unnecessary delays” in reaching an agreement.
Wollan’s letter also tried to stress an openness to using lease drafts other private property owners have used when working with the city:
Although we have not received feedback from the city’s legal department on the agreement we drafted and forwarded over the summer, the city has signed agreements with other private property owners, and we would be happy to review and potentially use those agreements as a jumping off point if that is easier for the city and accelerates the process.
The archdiocese intended for the offers to be free of charge, except for any necessary renovations, which the city was asked to cover. According to the Sun-Times, city officials seemed “largely unresponsive to the offers,” except for one small gymnasium that ultimately was not selected for use.
The Sun-Times reported that in a “partially redacted email” sent to the archdiocese, “city officials visited one proposed site but ‘it turned out to be just a small gymnasium that couldn’t accommodate cots, so it really wouldn’t be an ideal location for us.’”
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The archdiocese’s offers to the city were ongoing “while thousands of migrants remained camped out at police stations and at O’Hare Airport, locations criticized as crowded and unsanitary,” the Sun-Times reported:
As charges for privately owned shelters mount, the closest the city came to accepting the archdiocese’s free-rent offer was at St. Bartholomew’s, a Northwest Side parish that Wollan offered to the city in October.
A shelter was supposed to open there in January, but the deal never happened.
Now, city officials said they have no plans to open more shelters.
