- Courtesy City of Chicago-Brooke Collins
- Mayor Emanuel greets Mayor Tang Liangzhi of Wuhan, China, yesterday
In 2010, in the “world-class” city of Chicago, as Mayor Rahm Emanuel calls it, one of every three children was living in poverty. And one of ten Chicagoans of all ages was living in extreme poverty—they were surviving on incomes below half of the poverty line.
That was then. Census data released yesterday shows the situation worsened last year. Child poverty in Chicago climbed from 33.1 percent in 2010 to 35.8 percent in 2011; extreme poverty rose from 10 percent to 11.2 percent. Both increases were statistically significant.