Fear of losing the “roof over our heads” is at an all time high in Chicago. Rampant gentrification is destroying once stable communities. Small homeowners can’t afford the ever-increasing taxes leveled against them and renters are driven out by impossible to pay rent increases. Public housing is disappearing from the landscape. Is it any wonder that we see thousands of homeless people (including children) roaming and even sleeping on the streets of Chicago? Add to this, the new reality for millions of families who are doubling up and taking in relatives or friends.
What does the housing crisis look like?
Foreclosures, Evictions and Homelessness:
52,000 homes were foreclosed in Cook County
(from 2013 through March 2015)
18,400 eviction cases were filed in 2014, up 20%
8,000 households forcibly removed by the
Cook County Sheriff in 2014
140,000 people are homeless in Chicago
(ABC Investigative News, 2015)
While 11% of Chicago’s housing is now vacant, gentrification is causing the rents to skyrocket in many neighborhoods. Today a family must bring in $22.62 an hour to afford a typical 2-bedroom apartment in Chicago. With good jobs disappearing and a low minimum wage, is it any wonder that 10,000 people left Cook County in one year (Census statistics of 2015). Many neighborhoods in Chicago have poverty rates from 40-60% and some communities are well over the 60% mark.
Why is there extreme poverty in the City of Chicago? Once upon a time in the industrial age of production Chicago was sometimes even a boomtown and jobs were more plentiful. As we enter ever more deeply into the era of electronic production, those jobs are gone – forever! And they are not coming back. And they are not being replaced with other types of jobs. Anything new that is needed in this economy is quickly replaced with robotics and more advanced software.
It may be that technology is replacing the need for human labor, driving our value as workers down, but can we allow the new “winners” in our society to dictate the fate for the vast majority of us. Of course we have to continue to fight the daily battles for survival that are the result of the so-called housing crisis in Chicago, but we can never really make progress unless we have a vision of the real solution to our problems. What we have now is a system where the wealthy owners of private property get richer by callous disregard for the welfare of the people. What we need to survive is completely ignored. Only money counts – only money gets its way in Chicago.
We can’t live like this anymore. Housing is a human right and must be protected by any government that calls itself “for the people.” There’s no scarcity of housing. There is plenty to go around. Whether we are renters, homeowners, or homeless – We all need to join together with one voice on this issue to demand that “we the people” be guaranteed housing no matter what our income!
