'Took Away Their Livelihood:' Activists Speak Out After Crews Trash Homeless' Belongings
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Advocates for the homeless said the city gave the homeless living under the Kennedy Expressway a death sentence on Wednesday when crews threw out their belongings.
Activists and former homeless men spent the night Wednesday outside City Hall in hopes the city will do more for the homeless. They spoke Thursday morning about the city's removal of homeless people's belongings from the encampment under the Kennedy Expressway.
"You took away the cover, you took away the tents, you took away their livelihood," said activist Andrew Holmes. "I mean that is just showing one thing - that you don't give a damn about a human laying on the streets in the city of Chicago.
"What you did is you just left them naked," Holmes said.
Holmes is attempting to raise funds through a GoFundMe campaign, the Andrew Holmes Help The Homeless Fund to buy a building for the homeless.
One of the men with Holmes, a former homeless man who lived on Lower Wacker for 10 years, pulled up his pant leg to show a prosthetic limb. He lost part of his leg to frostbite, he said, when he was homeless. He said taking the homeless' belongings was like a death sentence.
"Everything that they own is down there. You take away that, you are taking away their livelihood. You might as well put them in the grave," the man said.