Greg Schille had a plan to help the homeless individuals of Elgin, Illinois during this especially brutal winter. He invited them into his home for a “slumber party.” However, the City of Elgin wasn’t pleased with his actions. Elgin already had a solution to its homeless problem, exposure, so it threatened to condemn his home if he didn’t cease giving the homeless shelter from the cold:
A suburban Chicago resident who was offering up “slumber parties” in his basement for homeless people in his neighborhood during dangerously cold weather says city officials have given him an ultimatum.
Stop the “slumber parties” or the house will be condemned.
Greg Schiller, of Elgin, said he began letting a group of homeless people sleep in his unfinished basement last month during brutally cold nights, offering them food, warm beverages and a cot to sleep on while watching movies.
Yet again we see the fact that you don’t own your home. If you did own your home, you could do with it as you pleased. If you wanted to shelter homeless people in your basement on especially cold nights, you could. But you don’t own your home, the government does. You’re merely allowed to lease it so long as you pay your rent property taxes and abide by the ever increasing number of rules.
We also see yet again that city governments don’t want the homeless helped, they wants them gone. In the eyes of a city government the homeless are a problem and the only solution is to make them go away. To that end city governments try to pass ordinances that make the lives of homeless individuals as miserable as possible in the hopes that such ordinances will encourage them to move elsewhere. Not only do these ordinances criminal homelessness but they also criminalize helping the homeless. If these ordinances result in homeless individuals freezing to death, all the better as far as the city governments are concerned.