A sight all too familiar in poor neighborhoods, By Erik Eckholm, February 18, 2010, New York Times: “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…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty