🎧 Click on “Hear” to listen to Letonia Robinson’s story She’s a single mother who has tried for 2 years to search out an condominium in Chicago she will be able to afford.
If you happen to’ve tried to search out an reasonably priced place to lease in Chicago within the final a number of years, likelihood is you had a tough time.
Perhaps you needed to accept a spot farther from work or college; maybe you needed to dwell with household or buddies quickly.
For a lot of, the choice is simply paying far more for lease than you may afford. Meaning lease and utilities value greater than roughly one-third of your revenue.
Information from the U.S. Census Bureau reveals that 43% of Chicago’s renter households paid greater than roughly one-third of their revenue on lease and utilities, and about 22% of households spent greater than half of their paycheck on lease and utilities.
Since 2000, rental affordability has worsened for a lot of extra households, as rents rose sooner than incomes. To see precisely how a lot worse, WBEZ collected lease knowledge for each Chicago group space going again almost 100 years and in contrast how rents have modified relative to incomes.
We discovered that, in comparison with previous many years, there are actually fewer neighborhoods the place a lot of the flats are reasonably priced for 1000’s of Chicago renters — and that this affordability disaster has quickly expanded throughout revenue brackets and neighborhoods.
Tune into our audio story by clicking the crimson “Hear” button, learn the total story or discover the info your self.
🎧 On this audio function, WBEZ knowledge reporter Amy Qin talks to:
- Letonia Robinson, a 33-year outdated single mother who, for greater than two years, has struggled to search out an condominium for her household that she will be able to afford.
- Daniel Kay Hertz, the director of housing at Impression for Fairness, a Chicago-based public curiosity and coverage nonprofit, who describes the trade-offs many renters need to make.
- Alexander Hermann, a senior analysis affiliate on the Harvard Joint Heart for Housing Research, who says {that a} housing scarcity has contributed to excessive rents.
- Geoff Smith, the chief director of the Institute for Housing Research at DePaul College, an area housing coverage suppose tank, which finds that lately, Chicago has additionally misplaced rather a lot older reasonably priced housing to renovations and demolitions.
- Antonio Gutierrez, a housing organizer with the Chicago-based Autonomous Tenants Union, who says the state’s lack of lease management legal guidelines has allowed rents to skyrocket.
