Chicago failed to take Catholic archdiocese up on offers to house migrants for free

While Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration scoured the city for sites to house newly arrived migrants over the past year, offers for rent-free space from one of the city’s largest private property owners went unheeded.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago has space in more than 60 shuttered churches, schools and other buildings listed for sale or for lease. The church also has other unused spaces from waves of closures in recent years.

Church officials offered up more than dozen of these locations to the city, emails reviewed by the Sun-Times show.

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The church recently agreed to give Oak Park space in a closed school, St. Edmund, so the village can house dozens of asylum-seekers, saving the village potentially millions of dollars in rent.

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.

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.

In October, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago told the Sun-Times that the church and the city were in talks to potentially house migrants in church properties.

Emails obtained through an open records request show church officials pitching the city on potential shelters throughout this past summer, while church officials told the Sun-Times previously those conversations and tours of potential buildings date back to when the migrants arrived in 2022 while Mayor Lori Lightfoot was still mayor.

A pedestrian walks by the migrant shelter hosted by the Archdiocese of Chicago at St. Edmund Catholic Church in Oak Park on Tuesday. | Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

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A family of asylum-seekers looks through a pile of donated clothing at St. Edmund Catholic Church in Oak Park on Tuesday. | Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

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The migrant shelter hosted by the Archdiocese of Chicago at St. Edmund Catholic Church in Oak Park on Tuesday. | Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

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A family of asylum-seekers looks through a pile of donated clothing at St. Edmund Catholic Church in Oak Park on Tuesday. | Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

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On Oct. 25 of last year, Eric Wollan, chief capital assets officer for the archdiocese, wrote to city officials, urging them to have a lease ready for when a suitable property was found in order to “avoid unnecessary delays.”

He also wrote that key city agencies were months behind in responding to a preliminary proposal.

“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.”

City officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Wollan confirmed last week that providing the spaces for free was always the plan, though the costs of operating the shelters would need to be covered by the city. The archdiocese also asked that the city cover any renovation costs to accommodate the migrants, a source said.

Another email from Wollan contains a list of a dozen properties “that could be utilized for migrant housing,” including the school, church and rectory of St. Kevin on Torrence Avenue in South Deering and the St. Thomas of Canterbury building on Kenmore Avenue in Uptown.

“This list focuses on the larger-scale church properties,” Wollan wrote, referring to the city’s expressed preference for properties that can house a few hundred people. “Again, we recognize the urgent needs of our new arrivals, particularly in light of the impending seasonal changes and look forward to expanding our assistance in the ways deemed most helpful by the city and county to address these critical needs.”

In the emails obtained by the Sun-Times, city officials appear largely unresponsive to the offers, aside from one partially redacted email from Cristina Pacione-Zayas, Johnson’s first deputy chief of staff. In it, Pacione-Zayas said 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.”

The emails were being exchanged while thousands of migrants remained camped out at police stations and at O’Hare Airport, locations criticized as crowded and unsanitary.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times file photo

Instead of using the church properties, the city opened shelters at private properties for costs that were initially undisclosed.

The company that leases most private shelter spaces for the city is Equitable Social Solutions. The Kentucky company has been paid a total $45.5 million, according to a Johnson administration list of what it’s paying for the migrant influx. That’s roughly 15% of what the city has spent on the crisis overall.

The city shared the more detailed rental rates for seven private shelters covered by the company, including a shelter for around 1,000 people on Elston Avenue that opened in November, another for about 900 people on Walnut Street near the United Center that opened in September and the shelter on Halsted in Pilsen where 5-year-old Jean Carlos “Jeremías” Martinez Rivero was one of 2,500 people housed there before he died of sepsis from a bacterial infection.

A Sun-Times analysis shows that the city has paid around $18 million since September for the use of these three shelters, plus four others.

The company and city didn’t answer questions about how the remainder of the $45.5 million has been spent, or share rental information for several other private shelters, including some of the largest and longest-operating: the Social Club in the Loop; the American Islamic College on the North Side; and the Inn of Chicago in River North. Each holds more than 1,000 people.

Violet Miller/Sun-Times file photo

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.

Oak Park opens shelter at St. Edmund

Oak Park, however, has contracted with the archdiocese after it had been paying a steep rent for its shelters at one point. The near western suburb began housing migrants in November, after residents rallied to find shelter for migrants camped outside of the nearby Austin District police station in Chicago in freezing temperatures.

The migrants were staying at a hotel and a YMCA at a cost of about $67,000 a month, according to a village spokesman.

With the leases for those spaces expiring at the end of February, the St. Edmund building came up as an alternative, and migrants were moved.

“Otherwise, they had no place to go except into the city [of Chicago] shelters, and the stories we were hearing about them was that they were overcrowded,” said the Rev. Carl Morello, the pastor who oversees St. Edmund.

The shelter will remain open through the end of June, so children can remain in school through the rest of the year. It will be operated by a nonprofit through a state grant, which will also be used to cover minor building repairs.

By June, the aim is to move the migrants into housing with the help of state-funded rental assistance.

“We’re going to work our way out of business,” said Jack Crowe, the volunteer director for the Oak Park Transitional Family Shelter, the nonprofit operator.

Michael Loria is a staff reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South Side and West Side.