Lester Pigue, a lifelong South Sider, has had his troubles finding housing, but that doesn’t mean he begrudges help going to new migrant arrivals, even those potentially setting up camp in his own area.
“It’s just human rights,” said Pigue, 67, looking at a vacant parking lot at 115th and Halsted streets that’s been floated as the place where Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first migrant tent shelter might go. “Just because they’re from another country doesn’t mean they’re any different. They have dignity.”
The 12-acre parcel at the busy intersection in the Morgan Park neighborhood — near West Pullman and Roseland — has sat empty since a Jewel-Osco grocery closed there around 2007. Last week, Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th), chair of the Council’s Committee of Immigrant and Refugee Rights, mentioned it as a potential site for Johnson’s “winterized base camps” for migrants.
Johnson announced his plan last week when around 2,000 migrants were sleeping on police station and airport floors, causing problems for arrivals and police. The tents would be a stopgap measure for those migrants.
Lester Pigue, a Roseland resident who says he is on a fixed income and lives in a halfway house, expresses how he feels about converting a vacant building at the intersection of 115th Street and South Halsted Street on the South Side into a migrant camp as he eats in McDonald’s on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
Looking at the lot from a nearby McDonald’s, Pigue said he remembered when it was a Jewel and a Venture Store before that.
He lives “on a fixed income” in a “half-way house,” he said, but seeing migrants living at the Gresham District police station, several miles north on Halsted, has moved him, despite tensions over migrants getting help with housing ahead of Chicagoans.
“It’s not just a Black and Brown thing. It’s a human thing,” he said. “These people left situations of hardship to get here.”
The city did not immediately confirm that the site would become a tent shelter or how long till the first would be built.
There is a plan to bring housing, jobs and stores to the site in a development known as Morgan Park Commons. Abraham Lacy, president and CEO of the Far South Community Development Corp. — the nonprofit behind the project — said he expected to begin construction in 2024, as originally planned.
He declined to comment on the tent plan but added a key goal of the Morgan Park Commons project was to bring residents back to the neighborhood, and he hoped the city could find a way to look at the new arrivals as an opportunity.
“I see a benefit to any migration to our neighborhoods,” he said, referencing how Chicago was built up through an influx of migrants from the Great Migration. “To any city economy, it’s a great thing to have immigration come through.”
A rendering shows an overview of the development called Morgan Park Commons, planned at 115th and Halsted streets.
Provided
Not everyone was so sanguine.
“Why can’t they take them to a more affluent area,” said longtime resident Lisa Cordova. “I’m someone who loves people, but it doesn’t make sense.”
Local Ald. Ronnie Mosley (21st) planned a ward meeting about the proposal at 6 p.m. Wednesday at a Sheldon Heights Church of Christ, 11325 S. Halsted St., a longtime ward meeting place which also sits kitty-corner to the potential tent site.
The church hosts a well-known food pantry at the site, where director Eric Carter said they were already talking with the Greater Chicago Food Depository to ensure there would be enough food in case more people began arriving.
“That’s always a concern,” he said, “the possibility of running out of food.”
The food pantry sees about 250 people per week. When Spanish-speakers have shown up in the past, he said the volunteer staff has managed with Google Translate. He said those interested in volunteering could reach out on Facebook.
Speaking ahead of the meeting, the Rev. Leonardo Gilbert said that the church “was in support of helping people.”
The longtime pastor of the church didn’t know if the tents would in fact go up but said they would help provide blankets, coats or whatever else was needed if it get built there.
“What’s a burden for them,” he said referring to what the migrants have been faced with so far, “is an opportunity for us to create a blessing.”
Michael Loria is a staff reporter at 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 and West sides.