The changing economy has been cruel to much of Illinois.
Since 1999, all but 15 of the state’s 102 counties have seen poverty rates climb, with only Lake County bucking the trend in the Chicago area.
Tens of thousands of families confront what often amounts to a daily struggle, if not for survival then at least for dignity. And their troubles unfold mostly out of sight, in barren apartments, soulless shelters or overflowing trailers. In these unseen places, hope can be as scarce as cash; victories tend to be small, hard-won and fleeting.
Seven families across Illinois with incomes below the federal poverty line opened their lives to the Tribune this year. They are emblematic of groups traditionally at risk for hardship, but their stories are individual, compelling and demanding of attention.
– – –
ELDERLY: Rosalie Higgins of Wheaton, who despite decades of work entered her retirement years desperately poor.
RURAL POOR: Sarah and Lee Neff, whose pursuit of a dream house ended in a dismal trailer in Murdock.
IMMIGRANTS: Olivia and Juan Casteneda of Rock Island, veterans of poverty on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border.
SINGLE MOTHERS: London Williams, a young mother trying to get by in the isolated public housing of Cairo.
DISABLED: Cleo Barney and Roddrick Davis, young men permanently disabled by street violence, facing a hard future in Waukegan.
LOW-WAGE WORKERS: Zachary Abdur-Rahman, who came home to Rockford searching for financial stability, only to find it more elusive than ever.
SUBSTANCE ABUSERS: James Morrison, a drug addict trying to pilfer a living from the abandoned buildings of Rockford.
– – –
AFTER A LIFETIME OF LABOR
AT AGE 66, ROSALIE HIGGINS has no income aside from a monthly Social Security check for $623. The rent for her one-bedroom Wheaton apartment is $725.
The laws of mathematics would seem to make her life impossible, but she has found ways to get by. She picks up litter around her building, so the landlord knocks $50 off her rent, and so far has been willing to overlook the rest of the shortfall. She gets her food from the pantry at the People’s Resource Center, a social service agency where she volunteers several times a week.
She has taken in a roommate who helps with the electric, gas and phone bills. She walks everywhere she goes. She never shops.
“I make it,” she said, an American flag scarf wrapped around her iron-colored hair. “I make it by a tiny squeeze.”
This is where she is after a lifetime of labor. She worked as a baby-sitter, nurse’s aide, lay missionary, bank clerk, office assistant, hotel reservation taker, furniture saleswoman, fast-food employee, drugstore cashier and receptionist. She never made more than $9 an hour.
Her past is littered with failed attempts to land a more lucrative career. She didn’t make it through nursing school, wasn’t accepted into the Air Force, and after finishing classes at a trade school, discovered that the basic computer skills she learned were worth $6.50 an hour.
When a personality clash caused her last job to end two years ago, she considered herself retired. She’s worn out and angry: Nearly five decades of scraping by have convinced her there’s no place in the economy for someone like her.
“There’s no excuse for a human being not getting a job for at least $12 an hour–that’s what the price of living costs,” she said. “Who’s buying all the houses? Who’s living in the houses they’re building so much? That’s all you hear on TV. The house craze. Not on my end. Everyone’s poor.”
– – –
A SMALL MEASURE OF DIGNITY
LEE AND SARAH NEFF came to eastern Illinois 15 years ago, dreaming of Victorian splendor.
They had been living on a farm not far from St. Louis when they saw a newspaper ad for a marvelous old house in the tiny village of Brocton. The house had a sweeping front porch, handsome columns and a jaunty turret springing from the roof. Its craftsmanship reminded Sarah Neff of the farmhouse she grew up in.
The Neffs, who scraped by on Sarah’s job as a home health aide and Lee’s disability payments, rented the place and made a tentative agreement to buy it. They refinished its wood floors and cleaned its sumptuous velvet curtains, hoping to restore enough of the house’s grandeur that they might make a little money by opening it for tours.
But after two years, the owners decided to keep it in the family. The Neffs and their young daughter had to move.
Their next stop was a modest two-story house in the even smaller town of Murdock, about 30 miles southeast of Champaign. They made a deal with the owner to buy it through installments, paying $750 a month until the balance of $12,000 was paid off. The house often flooded, and the family replaced ruined floors, plasterboard and paneling, working on the place as if it were their own.
It wasn’t, though. The Neffs said the owner never supplied them with a copy of the contract, and that they withheld the last of their payments in protest. After a decade of stalemate, the matter landed in court, where a judge in 2005 found that the Neffs had violated the agreement by not paying one year’s real estate taxes. He ordered them to leave.
They didn’t go far. Years before, the Neffs had bought a small patch of land adjoining the Murdock home, wanting to park their vehicles in a large garage that was attached to a dilapidated house. When they were evicted, the Neffs and their daughter, Kandee, now 19 and a community college student, parked a cramped, borrowed camper on the property and settled into a new and harder life.
The camper is packed wall-to-wall with their clothes and belongings. It has water pumped from an outside tank, and electricity, but little else.
“We have no furnace that works; we have no water heater and no refrigerator,” said Sarah Neff, 65. “We heat with electric space heaters in the wintertime, and needless to say, it’s not extremely warm, because then we can’t afford the [power] bill.”
The run-down house on their property has become their last hope for recovering a measure of dignity. With the help of their church and some friends, they have tried to make it habitable, but progress has been slow.
After an industrial accident in the 1970s, Lee Neff, now 64, has been unable to lift more than 5 pounds. Sarah Neff, limited by her own health problems, has found only part-time work, and their income of about $13,000 a year leaves them unable to afford supplies. So far, they have been unsuccessful in landing weatherization grants from the government.
They have managed to drywall four rooms, but much of the house remains to be done. They have a working furnace but no ventilation system. They have dug a trench for a water line, but can’t tap it until they come up with $1,300 for the activation fee.
As another winter clamps down on the state, the Neffs awake each morning to see their former home, still unoccupied, mocking them as it deteriorates.
And every so often they drive to Brocton to look at the Victorian house that brought them to the area, wondering how life would have been had they never come.
– – –
NO ESCAPE FROM POVERTY
IT HAS BEEN 11 YEARS since Olivia and Juan Francisco Casteneda left the poverty of Zacatecas, Mexico, for the poverty of the Quad Cities.
Despite their struggles, they have no doubt that they made the right decision.
Back home, they said, they would be lucky to find jobs at all, while the cost of food would be even higher. Though the family often runs short of money in Rock Island–needing help to pay bills or feed the five kids and two grandkids–Juan Francisco Casteneda said life in America is better by reason of simple arithmetic.
“In Mexico, the pay is much less than here,” he said in Spanish. “There, for eight hours of work they pay 100 pesos”–about $9.
Castaneda, 47, pulls down about $24,000 annually from his job in a scrap yard, cutting up John Deere tractors and other old machinery with a torch. It’s a decent salary for someone with little education and no English skills, and it has allowed the family to buy an aging, drafty three-bedroom house. But it’s not nearly enough to meet the family’s needs.
The kids get their clothing secondhand, and five girls share a single bedroom. Food often comes from a church pantry. In the winter, their monthly gas bill–about $480–is higher than their $420 mortgage payment. Even in a land of relative plenty, it’s a hard way to live.
“[The children] want clothes, and we can’t buy them,” said Olivia Casteneda, 46. “They want toys, and we can’t buy them. It’s very hard, especially when they see other kids get things.”
As with so many other immigrants, though, their children appear poised to do better. Their son Horacio, 25, joined the Army and is a military police officer posted in Iraq. Their daughter Magaly, 21, who works for minimum wage at a grocery store, has completed some community college courses toward becoming a certifi ed nurse’s aide.
She is thinking about heading to the hotter job market in Atlanta once she gets her degree, though she concedes it would be tough to move away from her family. The hardest thing about leaving Mexico when she was a little girl, she said, was saying goodbye to her relatives.
Olivia Casteneda keenly feels the burden of living poor in America. Her husband, however, prefers to look on its promise. Despite having to ride a bicycle in all sorts of weather to a job that has left him injured more than once, he said he can’t imagine returning to Mexico.
“It isn’t hard to live here,” he said. “That’s why we’re still in this country.”
– – –
A MOTHER BEFORE HER TIME
IN THE CRUMBLING SOUTHERN ILLINOIS CITY OF CAIRO, the Leroy McBride Project was a haven for London Williams. The 20-year-old paid only $101 a month for a spacious, subsidized apartment that for two years had been a home to her and her two young children.
Almost all her needs were met: She received $408 a month in food stamps and about $250 in government cash after the rent was paid–enough to put clothes on her kids and a couple of hours on her cell phone. Plenty of other young mothers lived in McBride too: On a mild July afternoon, as children scampered around the grassy, littered courtyard and moms smoked and gossiped on their concrete patios, the place could feel as comfortable as a family reunion.
“Living here is pretty easy once you get in and get situated,” Williams said. “But there’s not much to do.”
Indeed, Cairo has no mall, no movie theater, no recreation center, no swimming pool–nowhere for the young to gather. And that, social workers say, contributes heavily to a rate of teen motherhood that is the highest in Illinois.
“There’s nowhere to hang out except in your home or somebody else’s home,” said Mae Ella Williams, a nurse who works with the local health department. “They like to get together. And when young people get together. … things happen, and babies are made.”
Government assistance gives young moms and their kids money for rent and food, but it falls well short of the help needed to push families out of poverty. Most crucially, residents say there is insufficient public transportation to the closest major source of jobs–Cape Girardeau, Mo., a 45-minute drive.
And so, many moms stick around the fading pink and blue buildings of McBride all day, every day, watching TV, napping, absorbing the booming car stereos and occasional courtyard fights like so much background noise.
Williams, though, had a plan for escape. She had recently received a nurse’s assistant certificate, which would allow her to take a minimum wage job at a home for the elderly that was within walking distance. Soon, she said, she would take classes to become a licensed practical nurse, a more lucrative profession that could get her a job anywhere in the country.
As it happened, Williams did leave McBride, though not in the way she intended.
After missing four rent payments, she was evicted in October. Her father allowed her and her children to move into a small house he owned in Cairo, but the rest of her plans would have to wait for a few months more–if not longer.
Because the day before Thanksgiving, Williams gave birth to her third child.
– – –
STUCK IN A BROKEN BODY
CLEO BARNEY MANAGED to stumble away after he was clubbed in the base of the skull with a baseball bat, but moments later something told him to sit down. He hasn’t gotten up since.
Barney, 22, was paralyzed from damage to his spinal cord in the 2005 attack, the spillover from a dispute on a South Side street. Though he had been in trouble with the law–he served 2 years’ probation after Chicago police caught him with a handgun–Barney was trying to turn things around. He had plans to become a computer technician and was even supposed to attend his first class the day of the attack.
Instead, Barney was cast into months of therapy at a hospital and a hellish year in a nursing home, where he was a young man surrounded by elderly, often demented patients. His only comfort was buying a $15 pizza with the $30 of Social Security money he received each month.
“Nursing homes be crazy, to tell you the truth,” he said. “You got to be crazy to be in there.”
With no savings and no job, Barney was stuck. But then he caught a break: A friend he met in therapy told him about a new Waukegan apartment building that catered to people with disabilities, requiring them to pay only a third of their income, whatever it might be, for rent. After incessantly phoning the building’s management– an Evanston-based non-profit called Over the Rainbow–he got in.
His next-door neighbor is Roddrick Davis, a 23-year-old from Waukegan. Davis had led a rough life that included run-ins with police and a conviction for unlawful restraint. Two years ago, an argument outside a local motel ended with an assailant shooting Davis in the neck. He was left in a wheelchair.
Davis was playing semi-pro football at the time and was trying to get into college in Louisiana, where he spent much of his childhood. But after the shooting, his time was filled with medical appointments, physical therapy and the challenge of stretching a $400 disability check and $90 in food stamps over a full month.
Still, he remains optimistic that he will walk again, and said he dreams of starting a clothing line and opening an inner-city youth center.
“A lot of people don’t give people in a chair a chance to do anything,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you’ve got a sad life.’ But it’s not that way. It’s what you make of it.”
For his part, Barney still hopes to learn the computer trade. But that means getting together enough money for school, not an easy chore when his monthly income is only $450 in disability, and when he can’t afford the $600 needed to outfit a car with hand controls– much less the car.
Barney’s sardonic sense of humor keeps him sane and mildly upbeat about his future. But with endless days stretched before him, there is plenty of time for despair too.
“I sleep most of the time ’til late, because, I don’t know, I just be sitting up until I really feel like I’m about to fall out,” he said. “Because I just want to get out and do so much [stuff], and I’ll just be sitting there looking at cars. It’s like, ‘Damn, everybody doing something.’ And I’ll be sitting there–stuck–most of the time.”
– – –
JUST HOW QUICKLY IT CAN HAPPEN
ZACHARY ABDUR-RAHMAN went from middle class to poverty in just three months.
Last year, the 38-year-old single father was living in Atlanta with four of his five children, using his skills in computer-aided design to draft plans for a fast-food restaurant. But it was temp work, and when the project fell through, so did his job.
Unable to land another position, Abdur-Rahman burned through 13 weeks of unemployment pay, most of which went toward the $550 rent on his two-bedroom apartment. The benefits ran out last December, and he was left with $307 in savings–just enough to buy bus tickets back to his childhood home of Rockford.
There, he and three of his kids (the fourth stayed with family in Georgia) moved into his mother’s one-bedroom apartment in the Blackhawk public housing complex. He cast around for work, walking everywhere in the bitter cold of winter, until he finally landed a job–$9.25 an hour on the assembly line for a Chrysler parts supplier.
While Abdur-Rahman went off to the 11 p.m. shift, his son and two daughters went to sleep on the living room couch or on blankets covering the floor. He would come home at 7 a.m., get the kids to school, and then catch a few hours’ sleep until they returned.
It was a grinding, slow-motion crawl trying to get back to where he had been. But Abdur-Rahman tried his best to shield his children, ages 3, 5 and 6, from the struggle.
“As far as they know, their father has money,” he said one summer afternoon while the kids played in the apartment. “I’ll buy a certain amount [of small presents] and make it stretch a while, give them things to play with, pizza or McDonald’s. I’ve literally worn the same clothes over a period of years. If it fits, I’ll keep wearing it. That lets me get them clothes and uniforms for school.”
In the fall, things got worse. Tension with his mother prompted Abdur-Rahman to move out of her place, and he and his children became essentially homeless. His kids slept at a baby-sitter’s house while Abdur-Rahman worked his overnight shift. He caught a few hours of rest by day at the Islamic school where the children attended classes.
But then a bright hope emerged. He began to talk marriage with Haadiyah O’Neal, 33, a Michigan woman he had met on an Islamic Internet chat group. She has four children of her own, and in Abdur-Rahman she saw someone willing to fight for his family.
“A man that’s taking care of his children is a man I want to marry, because I know he knows his responsibility,” she said. “That’s pretty much why I had my eyes on him.”
They were wed at a friend’s house on Oct. 15, at the end of a weeklong visit–just the second time they had met face to face. A month later, Abdur-Rahman and his children moved into O’Neal’s four-bedroom house in Grand Rapids.
By late November, Abdur-Rahman was looking for a new factory job while still pursuing a degree in computer systems. The optimism that had seen him through his year of suffering remained.
“The hardship paid off in the end,” he said. “I don’t have any regrets with what I went through. It was just a learning experience for me.”
– – –
LIVING A DELUSION
AGAINST ALL EVIDENCE, James Morrison insisted back in June that he was a happy man.
His long hair matted, his face and hands covered with grime, he stalked anxiously around the leaky shipping container he called home. He was addicted to crack–had been for 20 years–and he hadn’t smoked any that day.
He had been bicycling around Rockford in the rain looking for scrap metal, the currency that paid for his habit, and had found only a lousy $3 in cans. It wasn’t enough to pay for a single $10 rock, and the scrap yards were about to close for the day.
And yet, he said then, life was good.
“I’m in my niche,” said Morrison, 46. “Everything I want, everything I need, is in a 10- block area–where I get my scrap, where I get my drugs, where I cash in my scrap, where I get food. It’s really hard to get out because I’m comfortable.”
He nodded to his container, strewed with junk and clothes, and added with a laugh, “Look where I’m living.”
He said he had been in Rockford for eight years, the last two in the abandoned container parked near the Rock River. Every afternoon, he and his live-in girlfriend, Judy Beck, 45, scoured the weed-choked lots and vacant buildings of the city’s rotting core, searching for bits of aluminum, copper and other metal they could turn into quick cash.
“There’s all kinds of stuff,” said Beck, who, unlike her boyfriend, was a relative newcomer to roughing it. “I’m still confused. One day, we found a big old piece of copper, 50 pounds, and got $1.50 a pound. It’s kind of fun.”
Morrison got lucky that afternoon. A friend had happened upon a thick piece of aluminum that bought him a half-dozen rocks, and he was willing to share. Yet as Morrison and his pal relaxed in a tent along the riverbank, white smoke curling about their heads, he knew the pleasure would be fleeting. He was already thinking about how he could get more.
In July, that insatiable need led Beck and Morrison to an abandoned building a mile or so from their trailer. Rockford police arrested them there for trying to steal the structure’s copper pipe.
Beck ultimately pleaded guilty to a different burglary and got 2 years on probation. But Morrison worried that his lengthy criminal record would yield a crushing sentence. He told himself that if he were offered less than 10 years, he’d take a plea deal.
He ended up with 3 1/2 years, time he’s now serving in the drug rehabilitation program at Sheridan Correctional Center west of Joliet. His days are filled with counseling, group meetings and classes in building maintenance. His shaggy mane has given way to a buzz cut. Regular meals have added 50 pounds to his once-bony frame.
He now has the time and inclination to ponder how he was addicted not only to a drug, but to the stealing, conniving and danger that came with it. He thinks about how he damaged his relationships with his family. And he wonders where he can go, what he can do, once he is released.
Despite all the questions, Morrison has finally reached one answer: Out on the streets, he wasn’t really happy at all.
“What was I thinking?” he wondered. “That’s how distorted I let it get. … You forget what’s real and what’s not.”
– – –
About 1.5 million people in Illinois — 12 percent of the state — live below the poverty line.
130,000 are senior citizens.
543,000 are children.
630,000 are white.
510,000 are black.
327,000 are Hispanic.
230,000 are immigrants.
300,000 are disabled.
———-
For audio interviews and more photos, go to chicagotribune.com/poverty
