Five-Year Homelessness Plan
Client: Chicago Office of the Mayor | Advisor: Deloitte
Opportunity
In January 2025, the City’s annual Point-in-Time Count estimated 7,452 people experiencing homelessness in shelters or unsheltered locations. WTTW’s “Number of Unhoused Chicagoans Dropped 60% But Remains at All-Time High,” reports homelessness in 2024 and 2025 is at an all-time high since the City started counting twenty years ago.
As affordable housing grows increasingly scarce and the cost of living continues to rise, more Chicagoans are being pushed into overcrowded homes, repeated moves, and homelessness. Long-standing racial and economic inequities in housing, employment, and health mean these challenges fall most heavily on Native Americans, Black, Latine, and immigrant communities. In Chicago, Black residents make up about 30% of the total population, but approximately 53% of Chicagoans experiencing homelessness and living in shelters are Black, while 70% of the people living on the city’s streets are Black. For Latine Chicagoans, homelessness takes invisible forms. National and local data, including the 2023 Chicago Coalition for the Homeless report, show that 91% of Latine Chicagoans experiencing homelessness are doubled up, living temporarily with others due to financial or safety pressures.
Global political and economic crises have driven large numbers of people to Chicago. From 2022 to 2024, the city and state supported more than 52,000 people arriving from Texas, as well as new arrivals from Afghanistan and Ukraine—many of whom remain in housing uncertainty as they await work authorization and long-term legal status.
To address the crisis in homelessness, the City appointed its first Chief Homelessness Officer to coordinate the city’s efforts to address the homelessness crisis and develop a long-term strategy to help people experiencing homelessness find stable, permanent, and affordable housing.
Based on Civic Consulting Alliance’s expertise in community engagement, including the Whole School Safety effort, Black Student Success Working Group, and Community-Focused Policing initiative, Civic Consulting Alliance was asked by the Mayor’s Office to support the City’s five-year plan to reduce homelessness.
Action
Starting in July 2024, across three phases of projects, Civic Consulting Alliance and Deloitte partnered with the City’s Chief Homelessness Officer and other partners to develop a five-year plan to address homelessness:
Engage stakeholders: Deloitte completed nationwide best practice research on engagement and synthesized qualitative and quantitative input into actionable findings and recommendations to inform the plan’s foundation.
Build governance model: Our team collaborated with City leadership to explore governance models that clarify roles, maintain momentum, and enable effective decision-making across diverse stakeholders. Additionally, we supported the launch of the mayor’s first Office-led interagency task force on homelessness, known as the Chicago Homelessness Interagency Collaborative (CHI Collab).
Develop report: Our team provided thought partnership and feedback to the Chief Homelessness Officer to draft the five-year Homelessness Plan.
"Collaborating with the Civic Consulting Alliance on the City of Chicago’s comprehensive homelessness strategy demonstrated what’s possible when community engagement and rigorous analysis come together into a clear, actionable roadmap that will position Chicago for a future in which homelessness is rare, brief, and nonrecurring."
— Noemie Tilghman, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
“Launching the City’s first comprehensive homelessness strategy required building both trust and infrastructure at the same time. Civic Consulting Alliance was a true thought partner as we stood up this new role—bringing proven community engagement expertise, steady coaching, and a clear-eyed understanding of how to move complex, cross-sector work forward. Their support helped ensure the plan was shaped by residents across all 77 community areas and positioned for long-term impact.”
Impact
During the winter and spring of 2025, this project engaged more than 4,000 residents across all 77 Community Areas to inform the development of the City’s long-term homelessness strategy. On January 14, 2026, the Draft 2026–2031 Five-Year Blueprint on Homelessness was formally released at a Subject Matter Hearing before the Committee on Housing & Real Estate. This launched a public comment period, which remained open from January 14 through February 13, 2026, demonstrating continued commitment to a community-led process. The newly released Five-Year Blueprint on Homelessness (the Blueprint) envisions a future for Chicago in which homelessness is rare, brief, and nonrecurring, and in which responses are rooted in compassion and dignity.
As federal policy shifts, Chicago will need a coordinated, locally anchored, solutions-oriented strategy to overcome homelessness. Funding threats place long-standing housing programs and the stability of thousands of residents at direct risk. Now more than ever, Chicago needs a whole-of-government approach to protect its housing infrastructure and ensure a range of solutions for Chicagoans facing housing instability.
In the years ahead, we expect to continue providing ad hoc thought partnership to the Chief Homelessness Officer and may support the implementation of specific priority strategies of the Homelessness Plan.