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A garnishment hits this kind of household budget like a bomb. Federal law and most state laws protect only the poorest of the poor from having their wages seized, otherwise allowing plaintiffs to seize up to a quarter of a worker’s after-tax pay. If that paycheck is deposited in a bank, that and other money in the account can be seized to pay down the debt. When garnishment protections do exist, the burden is usually on debtors to figure out if and how the laws protect their assets.


In Jennings, the struggles with debt compound other hardships common to black communities in St. Louis and elsewhere: conflicts and tension with police, and a municipal court system that has jailed residents over unpaid traffic tickets. To Jennings’ northwest lies the city of Ferguson, where the killing of teenager Michael Brown by a police officer last year sparked protests and rioting. The Rev. Starsky Wilson is co-chair of the Ferguson Commission, a panel created by Missouri’s governor to study the underlying social and economic conditions behind the unrest. Lack of economic mobility is a key issue, he said, and there are two sides of the coin. Improvements in education, job training and wages can push people up the ladder. But equally important, he said, are the forces that drag them down.


“If you’re still stuck in this web of indebtedness, you’re not going to be economically mobile,” he said. Experts cite many reasons why blacks might face more lawsuits, foremost among them the immense gap in wealth between blacks and whites in the U.S. It’s a gap that extends back to the institution of slavery and, more recently, to 20th century policies that promoted white homeownership while restricting it for blacks.


Today, the typical black household has a net worth of $11,000, while that of a typical white household is $141,900. As a result, while the budget is often tight for any low- or middle-income household,


black households are less likely to have resources to draw on when they need it.


In Jennings, that is a reality felt even in City Hall, where, along with the mayor, five of the eight sitting city council members (seven of whom are black) have been sued over a debt - although none of them knew about their shared plight until ProPublica shared its data. “I’m in a generational hole,” said Miranda Jones, 41, a Jennings city council member and executive with Better Family Life, a St. Louis-based nonprofit devoted to supporting black families. She and her husband have been sued three times in recent years over debts, once resulting in the seizure of $800 from her bank account.


“Coming from East St. Louis from a poor family, I started off in debt,” she said. She managed to transcend those circumstances to attain a college degree, but that accomplishment came with a load of student loan debt.


“I’m trying to break the cycle for my kids, and it’s very difficult,” she said.


Read the complete article, visit: https://www.propublica.org/article/debt-collec- tion-lawsuits-squeeze-black-neighborhoods. Special thanks to ProPublica and the authors of this article, Paul Kiel and Annie Waldman for giving the DSI Black Pages permission to republish this article.


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