(The Center Square) – State and federal taxpayers are poised to spend more than $600 million on homeless prevention efforts in Illinois during the current fiscal year.
A report released earlier this month by the Interagency Task Force on Homelessness and the Illinois Office to Prevent and End Homelessness said overall homelessness declined 6% between 2025 and 2026 while chronic homelessness rose 28%.
Home Illinois, the state’s plan to prevent and end homelessness from July 2026 through June 2029, said state agencies will manage more than $619 million in fiscal year 2027, including more than $563 million in funding from state taxpayers and over $56 million from federal taxpayers.
The Center Square asked state Sen. and task force member Li Arellano, R-Dixon, why the state is spending so much taxpayer money when the homelessness problem does not appear to be getting better.
“That’s a great question,” Arellano said.
Arellano said, even though overall homelessness went down, the problem is worse in many ways.
“When you dig into the numbers, I think you find one of the reasons homelessness went down overall is because the self-induced migration, both legal and illegal, crisis that was happening in Chicago started to ebb,” Arellano said.
The Dixon Republican said homelessness roughly tripled in Chicago during the illegal immigration surge under the Biden administration.
“In my communities, my 12 counties, there was a lot of resentment that their property taxes are high, overall tax burdens are high, and they’re shifting more money into Chicago,” Arellano said.
The Illinois State Board of Education identified 63,873 school-aged children as experiencing a form of homelessness during the 2024-25 school year, a 30% increase from 2023. Among those identified, 81% were “doubled up,” living temporarily with family or friends.
Arellano said the increase was tied to migration.
“We know it affected the cost of special education because English as a second language is special education. It’s very costly, but it also impacts school-age homelessness. If they are stacking into homes at a rate higher than the state would prefer and thus triggering those metrics, they get fed into the homelessness category,” Arellano said.
Arellano said he would like to see more emphasis on economic solutions.
“Instead of investing more directly into homelessness and maybe seeing mixed results, making sure we’re changing economic policy to prevent homelessness in the first place, get more to the root of the cause.”
Arellano said people in Illinois have higher property taxes without the economic growth of surrounding states.
Illinois’ projected $619,936,152 in spending on homelessness spread across 15 state agencies.
The state’s investment in homelessness programs increased by $16 million from fiscal year 2025 to fiscal year 2027.
