Philippians Banks knows what it's like to have nowhere to go.
Before she became manager at Windy City Weiners in Uptown Normal, Banks stayed with people who eventually asked her to leave. She slept on couches and, a few times, in a car — until someone paid for a hotel room long enough for her to get back on her feet.
"My situation wasn't as drastic, but it could have been," Banks said. "And I had good help — and not from the government, not from the City of Bloomington, but good people that helped and don't mind helping and really, genuinely want to see you do better."
Banks said that experience is part of why she has mixed feelings about the ordinance the Normal Town Council passed Monday, restricting where people who are homeless can sleep around Uptown Station, which is across the street from the restaurant.
"Is it necessary business-wise? Yes," Banks said. "Humanity-wise? No. We got to be empathetic, because a lot of these people that's homeless right now, a lot of them have mental problems and things like that."
The ordinance
The town council voted 5-2 on Monday to revise the code of conduct governing Uptown Station and the surrounding area, tightening restrictions on what town staff describe as "camping-type activities, excessive amounts of personal property, unattended personal property, storage of personal property on site, blocking of access points and excessive occupation of waiting areas."
A motion to delay the vote for more study failed 4-3.
The ordinance takes effect by the end of next week.
Violations can escalate from a citation to a ban from the area to arrest. The ordinance states people will be given a chance to comply first, and specifies it isn't meant to deny anyone access to public space "solely because the person is homeless."
More than a dozen people urged the council to delay the vote and consult service providers first. Council members Karyn Smith and Kevin McCarthy pushed back on the idea that the ordinance targets people rather than conduct.
Home Sweet Home Ministries CEO Matt Burgess disagrees.
"The behaviors that they're saying that they're targeting would pretty much only be exhibited by people who have no other place to lay down and get rest," Burgess said. "The rest of us are fortunate to have a safe place to sleep, a place to spread blankets out, to sleep on a bed. The folks who have been seeking refuge at Uptown Station don't have that place."
Burgess said he learned about the proposed changes the same way the public did — when the council packet was released the Friday before the vote, with no advance outreach to Home Sweet Home or, as far as he knows, any other service provider.
"Both the mayor and city manager have my cell phone number," Burgess said. "That's how committed I am to being available to talking about issues as they are developing, so that we can come up with solution ideas rather than engage in what feels fairly punitive for the individuals who are stuck outside."
People living in and near Uptown Station didn't learn about the ordinance until being interviewed for this story.
A man who declined to give his name spends much of his time split between camping at the Uptown circle and inside the train station. He said nobody had informed him or others staying in Uptown about the new rules.
Burgess compared the new ordinance to the decade-old code it replaces. Almost every behavior council members cited, he said — blocking access points, leaving belongings unattended — was already prohibited. The largest change was new, more detailed language explicitly banning camping and sleeping.
"Nobody thinks it's great that people are having to sleep in Uptown Station," Burgess said. "But it's shortsighted. It's misguided to tell people they can't do that when other options are not opened up for them."
What business owners are seeing
Martin Leon, who owns the Mexican restaurant Hacienda Leon across the street from the station, said the restaurant has had homeless people yell at customers on its patio and, once, come inside and yell at staff. The disruptions led him to call police more than once; one customer called police directly.
"I know on those times that these guys came to the restaurant, everybody feels uncomfortable," Leon said.
Leon said those causing the disruptions have since moved off his patio but have generally remained in Uptown. He's noticed the number of homeless people in the area grow steadily since the restaurant opened three years ago. He hasn't spoken with the mayor or town staff about it, only police. Asked what he thought the town should do, he said he wasn't sure — "but they need to work on something."
At the Coffeehouse, a few doors down from Uptown Station on Beaufort Street, Assistant Manager Jade Bandy described a similar shift. She said in the last year, minor loitering that used to be a non-issue has occasionally turned into complaints from other customers, and in a few cases, women who told her they felt unsafe when men approached them nearby. She said she's had the same experience herself walking through Uptown.
But Bandy was reluctant to frame the ordinance as a matter of "clearing people out."
Bandy questions "if just pushing them out and saying just 'you can't be here' is really an answer, because obviously they're looking for somewhere to go.
"They don't have the resources. So I think if we're going to be pushing them out, we need to have somewhere for them to go," she said.
'Please don't ignore us'
A woman who asked to be identified only as E and sleeps in Uptown didn't know about the ordinance either. She's on the waiting list for a bed at Home Sweet Home.
"Word of mouth in this community is pretty much how news travels," E said. "I haven't really seen or been around anybody in the past week that might have known."
E, 57, spent 32 years as a registered nurse. She became homeless three or four years ago, she said, after a bout of depression stopped responding to treatment while she was still homeschooling her daughters.
"Depression and homelessness don't discriminate at all," she said.
The McLean County Center for Human Services placed E in an apartment last April through a federal Housing and Urban Development grant. She said she believed she'd been enrolled in permanent supportive housing while she worked on getting back on her feet — filling out applications, stabilizing her mental health.
Three weeks before her lease was up this spring, she got a call.
"They said, 'Oh, we made a mistake. You were supposed to be for rapid rehousing,'" E said. "I'm like, how can you rapid-rehouse someone who just is not working?"
She said she'd been asking caseworkers for paperwork and program details since the previous summer — emailing, calling, showing up at the office — and couldn't get answers.
"Everything I've learned about the program, I've learned through my own research," she said. "I feel like I'm in a worse position now than when I first became homeless."
E rested in a chair in the Uptown Station waiting area with a bag of belongings surrounding her in a confined space. She said she doesn't blame the town for passing the code of conduct ordinance, and thinks a housing-first approach is right in principle. But she said placing someone in an apartment isn't enough without a plan behind it, and without decent credit, which she no longer has, rapid rehousing requires finding a landlord willing to rent to her in the first place.
"You can't just throw someone in a home and expect magic to happen," she said. "You need support."
Health conditions make the heat especially hard on her, she said, and she was grateful the town lets people wait inside the station.
Asked what she'd tell lawmakers if she had five minutes with them, she paused for a long time.
"That's really tough, because there's a lot," she said. "Just please don't ignore us."
Not everyone affected by the new rules wanted to talk about them. A man who said he's lived in Bloomington for a few months, staying close to his daughter, was found outside Uptown Station getting fresh air.
He said he and others spend most of their time inside the station itself, where people wait for trains.
He declined to give his name, be photographed or be formally interviewed, and said he hadn't heard about the new ordinance. He said he's working with the Bloomington nonprofit PATH to find housing.
Seeking solutions
At Windy City Weiners, Banks said the shop rarely has problems with people coming in off the street.
Food orders that customers don't pick up go straight to someone waiting outside instead of the trash, "just to make sure they got something in their stomach for the day," Banks said. People come in for water, get treated with respect, and leave when asked, she said.
Banks said public money going toward ordinance enforcement could instead go toward housing.
"I just want everybody to know these are human beings, and they probably once had lived a full and great life, and things happen," Banks said.
It's the kind of help Burgess said Uptown Normal still doesn't have in any organized form — nothing like Bloomington's day center at the Salvation Army or the micro-cabin shelter known as The Bridge which he said has already moved 54 people off the street this year alone.
"We need to be meeting people where they are," Burgess said, "rather than doing what we're doing right now."
Burgess said that must involve improved communication between service providers and the town. He said he took exception to several town council members reading parts of the ordinance aloud during the meeting.
"To be lectured and not taken seriously by so many of them, what other reaction am I supposed to have than being offended? The presumption was that I didn't read it."
Burgess said he thought he had established enough good relationships with community leaders in his 17 years at Home Sweet Home to be taken more seriously,
"I'm not going off half-cocked about some presupposition that I'm coming in with," he said.
Bandy agrees better resources are needed for people without permanent housing. After a recent trip to Europe, she recalled how homelessness was handled there.
"I saw so many people wearing vests that said 'homeless outreach,'" Bandy said. "There were people, like, actively going and searching to help these people."
Banks said she can empathize with the people living near Uptown Station after a personal brush with near-homelessness.
"I had to make a choice," Banks said. "Whether I want to be out here, sleeping in cars, or do I want to get up and make a difference in my life. Because that's not the way I was raised."
What changed things, she said, wasn't a program or a policy — it was people who didn't have to help her, but did.
"Everybody isn't given the same hand in life," Banks said. "Everybody don't have the same love in life. So that's how I feel about it. Be more empathetic and realize that."
