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.

This is number 24 on that Excel sheet. Well, my name is 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 and has no memory of Mexico where she was born. She's in this country

illegally. While we spoke, her hands kept fidgeting in her lap like she was washing them.

I've been living here for three years already. She lives on the second floor of a two flat on a

pretty street on Chicago's northwest side. When she moved into this apartment three years ago,

she bought patio furniture to have summer barbecue. And that's where we were sitting.

Emily's younger brother, an 18 year old with autism and diabetes, was watching after the kids.

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