José Muñoz, CEO of La Casa Norte, experienced housing insecurity in his youth. Now, he helps young adults build stable lives.

By Alonso Vidal

La Casa Norte leaders lead a program. The Humboldt Park-based nonprofit helps young adults with housing and other key needs. (Provided/La Casa Norte).

José Muñoz doesn’t have many photos of his childhood — almost all of them were lost between evictions and living in homelessness during his youth. 

His mother, an immigrant, worked two jobs to provide for her 10 children in Back of the Yards, but things were always tough. 

“By the time I was 20, I was on a path where I was either going to end up dead or in jail,” he said.

Finding stable housing was key to turning his situation around. Now, as CEO of La Casa Norte, he wants to help young adults find housing through its various programs. 

Once formed by “a desk and two people,” La Casa Norte is now one of the largest providers of support services for young people in Chicago, serving around 20,000 people citywide across all of its programs, Muñoz said.  

La Casa Norte was founded in 2002 in response to the lack of a support system for the young adults who had come from Central America as refugees, Muñoz said. Launched in Humboldt Park, the organization now serves multiple historically Latine neighborhoods. Many of these communities are experiencing rising housing costs, making it difficult for young adults to remain where they grew up, Muñoz said.

La Casa Norte receives young adults from different backgrounds and with distinct necessities, Muñoz said. The organization offers a range of programs to serve those needs, from emergency shelters and transitional housing to drop-in centers, rapid rehousing, permanent supportive housing, and various health, food, and community outreach. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What did you learn as a young adult experiencing housing insecurity?

José Muñoz (Provided/La Casa Norte)

There were periods of time when I was unhoused and sleeping out of my car. I'd sneak into work to shower and get ready. In between, I was trying to go to school. It took me about 10 years to graduate college, from when I was 20 until I was 30, not from a lack of trying, but because I didn't have the resources and was unstable. 

My father had a house in the Gage Park neighborhood. I reconnected, and he let me stay with him. When I first got there, it was the first time I had felt stable that I could remember, ever since I was a child. 

That home provided an incredible amount of stability for me. It allowed me to get back to finish my schooling, to be able to work, build my career, protect it, and take care of my family.

It was supposed to be a few weeks, but I ended up taking over the home and paying for the mortgage and all that, and maintaining him. 

I eventually had other kids and raised them in that same home. If it hadn’t been for housing, I never would have gotten my life together, and they [wouldn’t] have gotten their [lives] together. 

How might housing instability as a young adult affect someone’s future?

I believe that before you can do anything and work on anything else, you have to stabilize a person's housing situation. 

It's very difficult to plan for the future —  school, education, work — when you're worried about what's going to happen today, if you have to worry about where you're going to find your next meal, or where you're going to sleep at night. 

[Young adults] are at a greater risk of being abused, engaging in survival crimes, or being trafficked There are cases where folks end up having to live with someone else out of necessity. It compromises and puts them in a really tough situation, where now they're reliant on that individual for their housing or meals. There's a power that they have over them, and if they’re not with the right person, that's very dangerous.

What factors are affecting young adults looking for housing right now?

In communities like Humboldt Park, the price keeps increasing. You're seeing an increase in the prices for housing stock, and rents are going up, but wages have remained relatively low.

You have to remember that young people have less experience in the workforce. They're coming into the workforce in a minimum wage role.

There are not enough jobs for folks to live and work in their neighborhood. They cannot afford to pay the rent that you see in communities like Humboldt Park.

We know that the prices have gone up while the income that folks are able to generate [haven’t] — $1 doesn't go as far as it used to; it's a lot tougher.

[The mortgage rates] are higher than they used to be, even a few years ago. That has an impact on whether or not people were able to buy homes.

We’ve got to be creating more opportunities for young people to be able to earn higher wages and to go into careers that allow them to be able to gain the wages to be able to live, whether it's in this neighborhood or any neighborhood.

Why is it important to have different programs targeting various stages of housing instability? 

As a system, we need to be mindful that people enter homelessness for different reasons. 

There's got to be different programs to support those different needs.

Shelter is probably the most important thing that we could provide for them. A young person comes into our program and an emergency shelter, and they may only need it for a night or two. There's also a need for more long-term support in order to get them on their feet.

You have other youth who are now ready to transition out there. They're more stable. They're trying to go to school, or they're working. Programs like our Transitional Housing Program or Youth in College Program — more long-term, stable programs — are very important for them.

What other skills does La Casa Norte offer young adults to prepare for a future outside the programs? 

We still have a lot of youth who don't know how to write a check, and they do not understand what credit means or how to build a credit score. And so we try to make sure that our youth understand what that means, because it's something that impacts you for the rest of your life.

[We teach them] what to do when you get your first paycheck, how to budget to be able to live on your own.

A lot of the financial literacy that we're doing, because of the stages of where many of the youth that we have are at, it's more focused on teaching them about banking and how to save their money. 

How do you teach young people about community in your work? 

We have our workforce team that's actually teaching the youth about helping them prepare them for the workplace. 

They're going to different businesses around here [Humboldt Park] and providing support to people working at the coffee shops, just to learn what it is like to run a coffee shop and to explore that job opportunity.

The other reason is for them to get connected to the community. That's a community that's always gonna exist for them. 

If they end up leaving like Casa Norte, and they end up living in the neighborhood, they know the local coffee shop, they know the schools, the nonprofit organizations, they know the neighbors.

The whole idea is to try to help them build community. We all need somebody around us to support us, whether that's your family or the family that you created from being a part of a program like ours.

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