Last week, I got an email from Jimmy Thomas.

He's a counselor at a Chicago community organization called the Northwest Side Housing Center.

Jimmy helps people who are struggling to make rent.

He wanted to give me a sense of why he's so worried about a coming housing crisis that,

so far at least, has been largely

invisible. And so attached to his email was a spreadsheet of all the people he's been talking to

about the rent. Jimmy left off the names, but he kept the details. The spreadsheet has 48 rows,

48 families worried about their housing.

And then there are the columns, a column for citizenship status, a column labeled hardship,

mostly lost jobs, a column for how much each person's rent is per month, and how much they

owe.

There was also a column for landlord reaction with little cells filled with things like,

landlord is understanding, or landlord is not understanding, or landlord says she needs to pay or leave.

I picked a few numbers from the 48 and asked Jimmy if he'd put me in touch.

He reached out, and the first person who got back to him was number 24.

Hi, how are you? Hey, how are you doing?

This is number 24 on that Excel sheet.

Well, my name's Emily Sanchez, and I'm 23 years old, and I'm a single mom of two little kids,

18-month-old and a three-month-old.

Emily has bright eyes, glasses, and a ponytail.

She's got a big tattoo of Jesus on the cross on her leg from high school.

She's lived in Chicago since she was three years old

...