Nicole Foster says her children no longer can go to their Northwest Side neighborhood park because she fears for their safety.After a rapid rise in the number of tents sheltering homeless people there this summer, Foster says her 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son are steering clear of Gompers Park, a 42-acre sanctuary at Foster Avenue and Pulaski Road.The park was a favorite spot for Foster’s family. The kids liked to dip their feet in a fountain that flowed into a nearby lagoon. But that fountain was shut off after people who live nearby complained that unhoused people were using it to bathe and wash dishes.Like many of her neighbors, Foster wants Mayor Brandon Johnson to do something about the 25-plus tents at Gompers. After all, they point out, the city has cleared out other homeless camps across the city — even spending more than $800,000 on a fence to keep people out of land south of downtown where there was a high-profile tent camp.The cost to address Gompers “isn’t as much as he spent on a fence,” Foster says.But Johnson's administration says there’s no money left for Gompers after the city has spent $70 million in federal money since 2020 on homelessness. So there will be no push to move people from the Northwest Side park this year, the city says, just continued monitoring.On Monday, Sendy Soto, Johnson’s top official in charge of addressing homelessness, plans to be at a community meeting next to the park to face neighbors unhappy about the homeless camp, which they say has been the scene of drinking and drug use, open fires and erratic behavior.City officials say they stepped up individual counseling recently at Gompers because of drug use and are visiting the camps every other week.Earlier this year, city officials said there was one tent in the park last spring and seven unhoused people. Neighbors say there have been varying numbers of tents over two years and that two encampments — one close to Pulaski and another near Foster — have grown this year. Children play baseball next to a homeless encampment at Gompers Park.Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere / Sun-Times Neighbors say the homeless campers refuse to move. They want the city to use a tactic known as an “accelerated moving event” to give the park’s inhabitants no choice but to leave.The same process was used this summer, first when a tent city full of homeless people was moved from the North Branch of the Chicago River between Foster and Bryn Mawr avenues to apartments or temporary shelters, putting them in line for more permanent housing. Then, city officials made the same offer at another large tent city in Humboldt Park. Related Ahead of DNC, Brandon Johnson puts homeless on the street to make room for tent city occupants The city's approaches to helping unhoused people have varied this year.In addition to clearing out a highly visible camp ahead of the Democratic National Convention, the city closed a shelter in a former hotel earlier this month. A hotline for affordable housing abruptly shut down for most of the summer and only recently restarted. A number of Chicago City Council members are pressing the mayor to improve plans for unhoused people during extreme weather.Earlier this year, Johnson couldn’t find enough support from voters for a referendum, dubbed Bring Chicago Home, that would have used the real estate transfer tax on high-end properties to bring in more money to tackle homelessness.On a recent morning, the people living in the park included a mix of day laborers hoping to find work and others bailing out their tents following recent rains.Brian Bayawa, 51, who's among those staying at the park, says he has long been a caregiver to elderly patients and became homeless about six months ago, after a client died and temporary jobs dried up. After briefly staking out another city park, he says he settled at Gompers.Bayawa’s not sure of his next move but welcomes help to find subsidized housing and a way to get back to work. Brian Bayawa, 51, is a caregiver who worked with elderly patients before becoming homeless six months ago. He says he’d welcome assistance getting placed in permanent housing.Brett Chase / Sun-Times Similarly, a man who asked only to be identified by his first name Oscar, says he would welcome a way to get housing assistance after living on the streets for almost five years. Oscar, 50, says he is a handyman and lives apart from the two tent encampments.A 33-year-old man who identified himself as Ivan says in Spanish that he would like help from officials with housing placement.Nugent, legislators pressing for actionAld. Samantha Nugent (39th) says she has asked City Hall for help at Gompers. She’s been joined by four Democratic state legislators, including state Rep. Mike Kelly, who sent a letter to Johnson.The accelerated moving process — which involves working with each person to find alternate shelter — “would be the most appropriate way to do this,” Nugent says.Earlier this summer, a similar move got 16 of 17 people living along the North Branch of the Chicago River around Foster into shelters, Kelly says.“We think it's the most successful path to getting people off the streets and getting them the help they need,” says Kelly, whose Northwest Side district includes Gompers Park.“That's the biggest part," he says. "If people are just removed, the services can't find the people who need the help."But Nugent says she thinks most of the encampment residents aren't eager to leave.As for city officials, “I’m frustrated with them,” Nugent says. “We’re told they’re not able to do this at this time.”That doesn’t sit well with Gail Beitz, who has lived near the park for 46 years and is part of a group calling itself the Restore Gompers Park Coalition. Open fires, drinking and drug use should be cracked down on, Beitz says. Her organization, which says it has more than 300 members among a Facebook group, has been putting heavy pressure on Nugent.“We pushed her, and we pressed her,” Beitz says. “They need to enforce the rules and regulations in the park.” Nearby residents (from left) Gail Beitz, Terry Donato, Nicole Foster and Lisa Stringer next to a homeless encampment at Gompers Park. The sign notes an abbreviation for “accelerated moving event,” a tactic the city could use to clear the camp. Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere / Sun-Times Neighbors point to an Aug. 6 armed robbery of a 21-year-old woman in the park and other crimes as reasons to clear the encampment, though it's not clear whether the two men the woman described to police as her assailants are part of the tent city, and no one has been arrested.The Chicago Police Department declined to comment.Beitz and others say crime also appears to be on the rise in the surrounding area.Moves made to ban encampmentsIt’s difficult to track and measure whether crime is tied to nearby homeless encampments, according to Jamie Chang, an associate professor of social welfare at the University of California Berkeley, because often those locations aren’t tracked, and the smaller ones are intentionally meant to be invisible.Still, it’s a common perception that an encampment will lead to more crime nearby because people often assume those living there have criminal records, says Deyanira Nevarez Martinez, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University. But, even when that's true, some of those crimes could be tied to living in poverty, she says.The stigma around homelessness also plays a role in how communities have tried to solve this issue, Chang says.“That sort of other-ing and that stigma that exists between people who are unhoused and housed is such a chasm, and that is one of the root causes of this homelessness crisis,” Chang says.Since this summer’s Supreme Court ruling upholding bans on sleeping outdoors, more cities in Illinois and elsewhere have passed measures to criminalize encampments, Nevarez Martinez says. In August, Rosemont passed an ordinance banning people from sleeping outside.Many areas having issues with homelessness have been resistant to new development needed to curb the housing crisis happening across the country, according to Nevarez Martinez.“We can’t have it both ways,” Nevarez Martinez says. “We are either going to have the affordable housing, the multifamily housing and shelters so that our unhoused neighbors can be indoors, or we’re going to have the situation that we currently have, which is people living outside. We really, as a society, need to come to terms with that and really ramp up our development and our services for our unhoused neighbors.”Chang says people living in homeless encampments need to be moved to permanent, supportive housing where they will have a place to live while getting help with rent, mental health needs and other services."Sweeping people without meaningful pathways to stable housing really does do a lot of harm to this community," Chang says.The clearing of encampments can be costly for municipalities, she says: "I think that there’s an argument to be made that those funds should be spent and can be spent in different ways." Related Gold Coast hotel for homeless sees last residents depart Homeless hotline partly restarted 2 months after closing Ahead of the DNC, City Hall spent $814,000 on a fence to lock out homeless people City was on wrong side of $814,000 fence to keep homeless people out