DISPLACEMENT
No Safety Net
Barred from federal stimulus and living paycheck to paycheck, undocumented tenants rely on community groups— but both are running out of options. BY WOOJAE JULIA SONG AND ALEXANDRA ARRIAGA, CITY BUREAU The Housing Cliff is a special series about the COVID-19 housing crisis produced by City Bureau, a civic journalism lab based in Chicago.
M
aría Teresa Sánchez has no time to think.
She travels from Pilsen to Bolingbrook and back, nearly thirty miles each way, five days a week, to work in a factory where she makes $12 an hour. She spends hours caring for her husband, managing his dialysis treatment and talking with his doctors. Lately, it’s become so time-consuming that she had to take some days off work, which put a dent in the family’s sole source of income. On top of that, she’s juggling winter utility bills (the latest month cost $197), a twenty-five-year-old son who’s staying at home with them (he’s on house arrest waiting for a court date) and landlords who want to increase the monthly rent by $300 (they settled on $150). With the increasingly heavy weight of her responsibilities, in fact, Sánchez said she’d rather not think. “It feels really heavy,” Sánchez said in Spanish. “I tell my husband that sometimes I even feel depressed.” Eunyoung Jung’s day begins at 6:30 a.m. in Portage Park. Once she gets ready for work, it’s a rush to wake her six-year-old son and catch a bus every weekday morning. After dropping him off at daycare, Jung (who
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requested to use a pseudonym to protect her identity) takes another bus to the northwest suburb of Niles. The wholesale fashion store where she works has had a steady stream of customers even during the pandemic, which she said has been a relief. She and her coworkers get along well, and her manager lets her leave in time to pick up her son. This job allows Jung to pay $750 for rent and $1,000 for daycare each month. In a good month, she has maybe $200 left after paying for groceries and other essential expenses. “I feel really thankful, truly. I’m so grateful to God,” Jung said in Korean. “I’ve met a lot of good people at my job.” This is the delicate balance she’s rebuilt since early November, when she found out that someone at her son’s daycare center might have been exposed to the coronavirus. The center immediately shut down for two weeks. “I felt really panicked. I had to return to work the next day,” Jung recalled. “The only thing I could think about was that we’d have to find another daycare center.” Sánchez has made Chicago her home for over twenty years, but she’s originally from Puebla, Mexico. Jung just arrived from Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, a year ago. They’re both undocumented immigrants who have been working and caring for their families during the pandemic with little to no support from the public programs that have kept their documented counterparts afloat.
