Fifty people gathered around Lenise Forrest's home in Cabrini-Green this morning, asking a very pertinent question: "Where's our bailout?"
They gathered to stop Lenise from being evicted and to start a new movement - the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign. They say they're going to stop any eviction in the city that's happening because of a person's economic means.
The rich got bailed out, they say.
We will not be put out.Continue Reading...
An unlikely pair
Today, I got the news that my mentor just died.
I'm really heartbroken. I'm in pieces, actually. What is there to do or say, except to write? The medium we both loved best.
David McClendon was hired at the Chi-town Daily News just a couple of weeks before I started there as an intern. We sat back to back in a small office. On my second day, David got my attention by turning around and poking me in the back of the neck. It was weird, and I remember thinking, "I don't know about this guy... Who pokes their new co-worker in the back of the neck?"
Yeah, I'm terrible with first impressions.
Lenise Forrest outside her unit in the Cabrini Rowhouses
Last Tuesday was really frightening, but it's this Tuesday that Lenise Forrest really fears.
Last Tuesday, she says, the sheriff came to her two-bedroom apartment in Cabrini-Green, knocking on the door briefly before kicking it down. Several men came in, she says, putting guns on her and her brother and serving her with an eviction notice.
Seven days, they said, and they would be back.
So it's tomorrow that's worrying her. The day the sheriff comes back to haul her and all her things out of her apartment and onto the street.
Where will you go? I ask.
I don't know, she says.
Continue Reading...
image via wikipedia
Until you earn about $40,000 a year, you're pretty much stuck in poverty, economists' numbers show.
In fact, until you get past $40,000 a year, any raise or higher paying job you get might actually sink you deeper into poverty.
Take a look at this story about a single mother, who after getting a higher paying job, didn't spend a dime more and couldn't pay her bills:
Continue Reading...
Image from the Library of Congress via Flickr
African Americans make up a third of Chicago's population. But they're nearly half of the city's disabled population.
What accounts for that disparity?
It's not race. It's poverty.
According to statistics from a recent edition of the Chicago Reporter, when you control for poverty, that racial imbalance disappears.
Why does that imbalance exist?
Continue Reading...
If you're new to One Story Up, you might not be familiar with the Bledsoe family.
Back in July, we met the family - three children who were living
with their grandmother in Rogers Park when she suddenly died. Their
aunt - Erica Bledsoe - became their guardian, but the company that
owned their Section 8 apartment wanted to evict the family, which would
have left them homeless.
After months of organizing and community support, HUD stepped in and got the company to give the family a lease. The story is pretty moving and poignant - you can listen to Erica Bledsoe tell her story on Vocalo with me last week.
We're getting together to celebrate this important victory, next Saturday, November 14th at Mess Hall - 6932 North Glenwood Ave in Chicago from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
It'll be a potluck with music and discussion of further efforts to
start grassroots organizing within the Northpoint apartment community.
Photo by PSD
We're a nation of bootstraps. Pull hard enough and you can pull yourself from rags to riches.
Or so we like to think. New research suggests we're not as strapping as we might think when it comes to economic mobility.
New research from the Brookings Institution shows
that economic mobility - the chance a child born into a poor family has
to escape poverty - isn't as robust as we might think.
If you're born into a middle-class family, there's a 76 percent
chance you'll end up middle class or even wealthier. Born into a poor
family? Only a 35 percent chance.
But Brookings has a solution. Three simple rules to end up middle class, no matter how low you started out. What are they?
Continue Reading...
Image from Magical Screencaps
If you've ever seen Disney's Robin Hood,
you might remember a scene where the rotund sheriff of Nottingham
steals the birthday present of a 7 year-old rabbit, a gold coin his
poor rabbit family scrimped and saved to give him.
The state of Illinois is getting in on that action.
A report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows 16 states that gouge even the poorest of the poor on their income taxes.
The report measured the threshold at which states stop taxing - how low you can go until you don't owe. Illinois? We can go pretty low.
Continue Reading...
the ad in a Huntsville newspaper
Two U.S. cities are engaged in a knock-down-drag-out fight over public housing in their communities: Galveston, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama.
In Galveston, Hurricane Ike demolished 569 units of public housing just a year ago. Now residents of Galveston don't want that public housing rebuilt.
And in Huntsville, the local housing authority is planning to buy some foreclosed homes and turn them into public housing. But not if the upper middle-class residents of South Huntsville have anything to say about it.
They even took out an ad in the local paper, stating "Public housing is coming to your neighborhood," trying to get people to come out to a local meeting, where either side engaged in a heated debate over whether public housing should be allowed there.
It's not just Galveston and Huntsville - it's everywhere.
People
have a visceral reaction to the words "public housing" and it's usually
not good. These reactions often appear in the comments sections of
articles like this or on this blog, at community meetings and in other
public forums.
Continue Reading....
