While the Oak Park Village Board deliberates about creating an inclusionary housing ordinance to provide affordable units in new developments or money to help fund them elsewhere, an all-affordable housing development (above) has been approved for the corner of Oak Park Avenue and Van Buren Street.
21 students registered as homeless in District 91
Lynda Schueler, Executive Director of Housing Forward, said that by mid-November her staff will be turning some homeless people away from their shelters. There is a seasonal dynamic.
"Homelessness is a 365-day-a-year problem," she explained, "but the numbers seeking our services do tend to dip in summer. Some people prefer to sleep outside." Housing Forward made a decision 27 years ago to invest their limited resources in an emergency shelter that would be open mid-September to mid-May.
Wednesday Journal: Sept. 26, 2018. During a special meeting on Sept. 18, the Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200 Board of Education unanimously approved a data-sharing agreement with the nonprofit Housing Forward that authorizes D200 to share student information with the organization.
I read an article in the March 14th issue of Time Magazine the other day by Josh Sanburn titled “The radically simple solution to homelessness.”
In the article he said that for many years the thinking in this country regarding reducing homelessness was that we had to treat the causes of homelessness—eg. addiction, unemployment, racism, education, mental illness—first and then provide housing.
The problem, he continued, was that by the 1990s homelessness was increasing, making it obvious that the “issues first” approach wasn’t working.
10-year-old River Forest resident and winner of Fox TV’s MasterChef Junior cooking competition, Addison Osta Smith, support Housing Forward.
Illinois hasn't provided promised funding for shelter services, supportive housing.
"Addison Osta Smith endured the ups and downs of reality competition for weeks and now that she's back home in River Forest, she wants to experience those twists and turns some more. With part of her $100,000 "MasterChef Junior" winnings, Addison plans to take her friends to a water park with roller coasters. A portion will go to Housing Forward, a Maywood-based organization that helps the homeless, a cause she said she feels strongly about. The rest of the money is earmarked for Addison to attend culinary school and college."
