Why are “fiscally responsible” politicians spending taxpayer money to make people homeless?
This piece, including the title, has been edited to correct inaccuracies.
Distributed to Illinois media
By Sandy . . . Everyone needs a place to live, including people with past convictions. The government shouldn’t be spending taxpayer money to kick people out of their homes.
Beginning in 2020, Bob O’Dekirk, then-mayor of Joliet, Illinois, put in motion a scheme to evict people residing lawfully in a Joliet, apartment building. He first tried to evoke an Illinois law that had been in place since 2005, a law prohibiting more than one person with a prior sexual offense conviction from registering at the same address. This failed to gain traction when a federal court declared the law unconstitutional.
He then decided to use an Illinois law that prohibits persons with past convictions for certain sexual offenses from living within 500 feet of schools, daycares and other child-centric locations.
The mayor’s plan was to create what has come to be known as a “pocket park” within 500 feet of a
building owned by NewDay Apartments where several people who are required to register reside. He located an unoccupied house on a lot one block away and with the approval of the city council, on August 12, 2021, purchased it for $83,000. The City then paid an undetermined amount to have the house razed, the lot cleared, and the lot seeded or planted with grass. Now under the leadership of the new mayor of Joliet, businessman Terry D’Arcy, a new Joliet city council has approved another $100,000 in taxpayer money to establish a “park” on the vacant lot.
These efforts are being led by John Sheridan, head of a neighborhood council, and Jim Lanham, who is using this issue to further his campaign for a seat as Illinois’ 86th District state representative. According to a recent interview with Sheridan and Lanham, the sole reason for establishing this park is to get “rid of” the people who are quietly living in the NewDay building. But have they thought about where the residents will go if they are driven from their homes?
No one is safer when we render members of our community homeless. In fact, decades of social science research establish that stable housing is one of the most important factors in rehabilitation of people with past convictions.
People who have been held accountable for their crimes and served their prison time deserve the opportunity to build positive, law-abiding lives. The men residing at NewDay Apartments are doing just that. They are working to be productive, contributing members of the community. Some of them have been there for many years without any problems. NewDay provided this statement to NARSOL: 
“Community safety remains the #1 priority of NewDay Apartments, and that is exactly what we have provided. No current tenant at Cora St. has ever been accused of a new registerable offense, much less convicted of one.”
Former mayor O’Dekirk, Mayor D’Arcy, and Mr. Lanham have all emphasized their commitment to fiscal responsibility and fighting wasteful spending. Committing hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to a misguided publicity stunt that will do nothing more than remove men from their current, safe living conditions and put them on the street isn’t fiscal responsibility, and it’s not good policy.
Classifying pocket parks as a place where children gather for the sake of invoking statues to evict people is disgusting and irresponsible. I for one, hate seeing the law and taxpayer money wasted on such frivolous things.
This is not that much different from Missouri’s playground equipment rule. Missouri has a law on the books that registrants cannot reside within 1000ft of any public park that has playground equipment. The only grace in this law is if the registrant resides within the area prior, then they are not required to move (but probation and parole officers often ignore this exemption). There are many communities within Missouri that have been purchasing playground equipment as quickly as they can afford, at taxpayer expense via property taxes, for no other real reason than to take unethical, wasteful, and immoral advantage of this law to create zones to drive out registrants.
NARSOL began because of a use of a database commonly referred to as Sex offender registry. Twitter(formally) is another use of a database. Some few benefit from unfettered use of our database driven infrastructure. They would be the entrenched politicos, hell bent on expanded turf and powers. The mother of Elon Musk recently described what had happened with the Twitter files saga. US government officials were paying cash to tech firms, not just Twitter to silence or quash unpopular opinions but to eliminate political rivals campaign systems. His effort mirrors the underpinning of Facebook’s sex offender TOS which was accomplished via the email addresses demanded via SOR registration regulations.