Earlier News Coverage

An Illinois judge ordered a pair of landlords to pay $80,000 to former tenants after threatening to report them to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after a dispute in 2020. Samir Hanna, the director of housing justice and a senior attorney for the Shriver Center, said these protection are necessary to prevent the exploitation of tenants, "particularly as our current climate creates incentives for abuse."

Stephanie Altman, the director of healthcare justice and senior policy director at the Shriver Center, talks about the devastating impact that cutting Medicaid would have on the state of Illinois.

In an essay for Crain’s Chicago Business, Stephanie Altman — the Shriver Center’s director of health care justice and senior director of policy — describes how defunding Medicaid would make people less healthy and more financially unstable. She says the cuts would have ripple effects across the state, leaving Illinoisans more vulnerable to public health emergencies and push many underfunded hospitals that serve low-income communities to the brink of bankruptcy.

Jeremy Rosen, the Shriver Center's director of economic justice, was quoted in the Sun-Times about the benefits of the state’s expanded earned income tax credit. As of the 2023 tax year, the credit includes people who file using an IRS-issued Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, commonly used by undocumented workers.

On Inauguration Day, President and CEO Audra Wilson joined “Chicago Tonight” to discuss the significance of a second Trump White House. She didn’t mince words: “It feels like a war on poor people. He has used his platform to pit white working class people against people of color, who are also working class…when in fact he’s looking to cut the same supportive systems that white working class people have relied upon.”

A few weeks before his death in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke about the “other America” to a union group in New York. In his remarks, he condemned the structural nature of poverty, saying “this country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”

We live in a trickle-up economy, where the three million individuals who make up the wealthiest one percent of Americans are collectively worth more than the roughly 291 million people that make up the bottom 90 percent. This trend has accelerated in recent decades. For people in the middle, or at the lower end of the income spectrum, their piece of the pie is getting smaller.

As an organization committed to seeing governments raise money through progressive taxation, we at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law agree with the Tribune Editorial Board that Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan to use regressive property taxes to raise $300 million to close a portion of the city’s $1 billion deficit was a poor idea. We also believe that at least one proposal made in recent budget negotiations, eliminating the city’s guaranteed income pilot program to save $60 million, would be a terrible one.

There is an epic out-migration of Black families from Chicago, reversing the decades-long Great Migration that saw families leave the Jim Crow South for industrial jobs in Chicago and other Northern cities. Now it’s job opportunities and the promise of a better quality of life that are drawing Black working- and middle-class families, professionals and retirees to Atlanta, Houston and Dallas, as well as the Chicago suburbs.

Chicago-area residents might notice fewer health insurance plans available and a mixed bag when it comes to costs, as they select Affordable Care Act plans this open enrollment season, which kicked off Friday amid an election that could have consequences for future coverage.

“There’s not enough housing for low-income tenants,” says LaTanya Jackson Wilson, vice president of advocacy with the Shriver Center on Poverty Law. “The supply is low and the demand is high. That causes rental rates to rise.”

In New York state, tenants can now take landlords to court to force repairs and get damages, without withholding rent first. Here's how one of the first tests of the new law worked.