A Sight All Too Familiar in Poor Neighborhoods

[groovedaddy]

MILWAUKEE — Shantana Smith, a single mother who had not paid rent for three months, watched on a recent morning as men from Eagle Moving carried her tattered furniture to the sidewalk.

Bystanders knew too well what was happening.

“When you see the Eagle movers truck, you know it’s time to get going,” a neighbor said.

On Milwaukee’s impoverished North Side, the mover’s name is nearly as familiar as McDonald’s, because Eagle often accompanies sheriffs on evictions. They haul tenants’ belongings into storage or, as Ms. Smith preferred, leave them outside for tenants to truck away.

Here and in swaths of many cities, evictions from rental properties are so common that they are part of the texture of life. New research is showing that eviction is a particular burden on low-income black women, often single mothers, who have an easier time renting apartments than their male counterparts, but are vulnerable to losing them because their wages or public benefits have not kept up with the cost of housing.

And evictions, in turn, can easily throw families into cascades of turmoil and debt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19evict.html?th&emc=th

[closeupready]

1. This is so effed up - get a load of this

>>In one sign of rising concern, Congress in the stimulus act last year provided $1.5 billion for emergency housing aid, and that may help explain why legal evictions in Milwaukee did not surge last year. But this temporary measure and other rent subsidies help only a fraction of the poor.<<

For the amount we spend in less than two days in Afghanistan, that same amount goes towards emergency housing aid during the worst recession since the Great Depression.

And meanwhile, the mortgage interest deduction costs the Treasury over $76 BILLION per YEAR.

I'm sorry, but that is messed up. About what I'd expect from Congress.

[cutlassmama]

4. but making the rich richer with war profits comes first before

poor Americans :sarcasm:

[Blue Owl]

2. "Eagle Moving" company

Guess this is what our national emblem symbolizes these days, pretty much...

[postulater]

3. Milwaukee county has 28% of its population on Medicaid.

That has increased 15% in the last year. 25% in the last two years.

Milwaukee county is 71 out of 72 in health outcomes also.

Not good.

[Name removed]

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