Inside an unsuspecting building in Rogers Park is the first men’s homeless shelter of its kind in Chicago, with dorm room-style, or non-congregate, sleeping arrangements and trauma-informed design. Opened in Dec. 2024, it’s also the first new city-funded homeless shelter in nearly a decade.
“It’s the first new shelter in the city in probably 10 years, the first men’s shelter in years,” said Pete Marchese, president of Northside Housing and Support Services and project manager of the Rogers Park shelter. “Like 75% of the shelter beds in this city are for women and children. Only 25% are for men.”
Because there are more homeless people in Chicago than there are open shelter beds, men from across the city travel to stay at the 70-bed Rogers Park shelter, including many from the West Side. Out of the 141 homeless men the shelter has helped secure housing for — with over 300 total clients staying there since it opened — nearly a dozen now live in apartments in Austin.
“When we transition many of the guys into their own apartments, because we get rent subsidies from the city and from HUD [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development], we have to place most of the guys on the South and West Sides,” Marchese said. “For HUD, we get $1,250 bucks a month. It covers everything. You can’t get a decent apartment on the North Side for $1,200 anymore.”
Marchese said the limited number of shelters in Chicago largely comes down to approval from aldermen, who are ultimately influenced by the public.
“The alderperson’s decision cannot be checked,” Marchese said. “If the alderperson perceives that their reelection is at risk because their constituents knew that they allowed a shelter in the ward, that’s one of the reasons why alderpeople say ‘No.’”
In order to open in Chicago, a shelter must get a permit from the city’s Zoning Board of Appeal. To apply for a permit, a shelter needs a recommendation from their alderperson, who must hold at least one public hearing.
“We need to change the dialog across the entire city that homeless shelters, especially men’s homeless shelters, are a good thing to put in your community because it’s a place where your neighbors, your brothers, your brothers’ cousins, can get the services that family members can’t or don’t want to provide,” Marchese said. He added that the population of people who are homeless in Chicago “is not shrinking, and the pace of getting more affordable housing units is so slow that the real solution to reducing the problem is shelters. They’re cheaper and easier to build than multi-unit apartment buildings.”
And though shelters provide a short-term solution to homelessness, the ultimate goal of Northside Housing and Support Services’ Rogers Park emergency shelter is to work with organizational partners to find men staying there permanent housing.
Though the average client stays 154 days, men can stay at the Rogers Park shelter for as long as they want, as long as they follow shelter policy — including seeking employment, daily chores and meeting with case managers who match clients with necessary services. The Rogers Park shelter provides beds and bedding, three meals a day, free laundry and detergent, individual shower stalls, medical care, financial counseling, art therapy, and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
Anyone who is homeless in Chicago and seeking shelter can dial 311 to be put in touch with an intake and referral person who will direct them to a shelter with open beds, or, more likely, put them on a waiting list for days or weeks.
“The people that are at the top of the list are the people who are homeless but are the most vulnerable to acts of violence or something happening to them,” Marchese said.
Northside Housing updates its system whenever they have a bed open for the city to fill — though Marchese said the Rogers Park shelter has been full since opening.
“They’re filled all the time,” Marchese said of the shelter’s 70 beds. “On the entire North side of the city, we are one of only two shelters for men north of Fullerton.”
Opening the Rogers Park shelter
During Lori Lightfoot’s mayoral administration, Chicago’s Department of Housing allocated $30 million in unused federal Covid money to renovate five buildings to become non-congregate shelters, or shelters that have private rooms.
“It became obvious during the Covid epidemic that homelessness rose,” Marchese said. “So the city realized that they needed new shelters. The existing shelter capacity didn’t even come close.”
According to the city’s 2026 snapshot of homelessness, in 2020, nearly 5,400 people were experiencing homelessness, about 3,900 of whom were staying in shelters. Until last year, the number of sheltered individuals had decreased since 2015, when about 4,700 of 6,800 homeless people stayed in shelters.
According to Chicago’s annual point-in-time count of unhoused people, last year, there were nearly 7,500 people experiencing homelessness, over 6,100 of whom were staying in shelters or housing programs.
During Covid, the city paid for thousands of unhoused people to stay in hotels, instead of sharing large rooms at shelters.
“What the city found out is homeless men, women and children, if they were in a hotel in which they had only two beds per room and their own bathroom, they were much quicker to recover from all of the trauma of homelessness,” Marchese said, “and become mentally prepared to stabilize whatever made them homeless, get a job, and get their own place — compared to people who live 24 hours a day in one room,” like many shelters are laid out.
“It was the city who made the decision that all new shelters would have these non-congregate rooms,” Marchese added. “A lot of [clients] are coming from either a shelter or from the outside. They haven’t had their own private space in, for some people, years. It really makes a big deal in somebody’s mental recovery from the trauma of being homeless, coming to the same bed and not worrying about having anything get stolen.”
The city also led design for the new shelter, prioritizing trauma-conscious elements throughout the building. That includes lots of earth tones, windows and skylights to let in natural sunlight, plus rounded edges for light fixtures, door frames, and built-ins.
“That was deliberate, so it doesn’t have that institutional, straight line of a hospital or jail,” Marchese said. “What we see is the guys come in in fight or flight, stressed-out mode, and you see them kind of transform, where they start engaging with staff and other residents. You saw guys playing dominoes [in the common area]. They feel that they can be themselves because we provide all the basic needs, so everything that they used to have to stress about surviving and being homeless, all of that stress goes away in this place.”
Those experiencing homelessness can call 311 or visit the nearest police station or emergency room to be placed in a shelter or on a waiting list. Homeless adults 25 and older can visit the 24/7 intake Shelter Placement and Resource Center (SPARC) at 2241 S. Halsted. Families can go to the Salvation Army Emergency Assessment and Resource Center at 924 N. Christiana.