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Here's my little bit of analysis for why this is a chickenshit decision. There's 4 main political groups that Chicago politicians want to keep in the good graces of:
A system of care is cops caging 40 people?
Cops will never be truly satisfied with a Democrat mayor unless he's literally a cop, and they still give Eric Adams in NY problems sometimes. A smart politician will will understand that at some point you get diminishing returns on trying to appease the FOP and CPD at in general. While the rank-and-file has been grumbling about having the migrants sleeping in the station, because it makes manning the front desk more difficult, I think that he gave leadership such a boon by picking a top cop from CPD ranks that it is not urgent to get the migrants into tents just to keep CPD happy.
CTU. Obviously BJ is a CTU man, they're happy with him, and they have no interest in the fate of the migrants anyway.
Local businesses, bars and restaurants, hospitality industry, etc. These guys don't have any interest in the migrants. Maybe they want them as part of the reserve army of labor / to drive down the price of "unskilled" labor.
Local real estate, landlords, and developers. If the city was to buy up a bunch of buildings, condos, or even just rent market-rate apartments for the migrants, these guys will directly benefit. The city might buy or rent from them, and demand for another 2000+ units would allow them to charge more money for the housing stock the landlords already own and raise the value of whatever the developers are building.
I think that having the extremely visible migrant crisis, where these new homeless people are concentrated and visible every time you pass a police station or turn on the news, is a golden opportunity for Johnson. Because the plight of the migrants is basically the same plight as the rest of Chicago's homeless population. If he gets migrants out of the police stations and into housing, people will notice and it will be good for his approval rating. By setting up a good, sustainable solution for that, he could also spend money to fix Chicago's homeless problem without public ire (because nobody gives a shit about homeless people other than the migrants). Shelter availability is terrible; if you manage to get a bed you have 2 months to get a job before you're kicked out, and the wait for permanent housing is years long. People have been criticizing him for doing basically nothing, and knocking out two birds with one stone with a robust public housing program would solve that.
Instead, he's picking a cheap band-aid fix to get media and CPD rank-and-file off his back. Every Chicago mayor is the same.
political calculus aside, obviously tent cities suck for the people living in them. the contract for heating for these looks inadequate and it's a sick joke that the same company will be profiting from the oppression of migrants at camps across the US. but I just think this is a spectacularly stupid decision even for a Chicago politician. they'll do anything to avoid rebuilding public housing