On a spring day in 2014, Latisha Lacey, a single mother, moved into a freshly rehabbed two-bedroom home on Chicago’s West Side. It was affordable at $850 a month, so as time passed she tried to ignore the drug dealers in the alley, the landlords’ advances, and the prostitutes he invited into the basement. But her active boys disturbed his trysts, she said, and her continued rejection angered him. One day, without explanation, he refused her rent check. A week before Christmas 2015, he evicted her.
That rental was her sixth in fourteen years. One place had been riddled with drug dealing, another with rats. In another, she broke her lease after a break-in, suspecting the maintenance man. Another had a bad cockroach infestation from a second-hand oven the landlord installed. Worse, a routine screening at the pediatrician’s office had discovered alarmingly high levels of lead in her toddler’s blood. City inspectors arrived at her building and found lead paint everywhere, but the landlord refused to abate it. After a year, Lacey heeded the doctor’s warning and moved out.
“It’s stressful when you have to keep moving and moving with your kids,” she said.
[For more on this story by Liz Duffrin, go to https://medium.com/bhpn-crossw...-brains-9da54b267d50]
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