- tags
- Housing
Notes
COLD CITY
The rent was $550 a month, utilities not included, the going rate in 2008 for a two-bedroom unit in one of the worst neighborhoods in America’s fourth-poorest city.
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The marshals themselves were ambivalent about carrying out evictions.
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These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. There are hundreds of data-mining companies that sell landlords tenant screening reports listing past evictions and court filings.
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majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on.
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We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.
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PART ONE: RENT
1. THE BUSINESS OF OWNING THE CITY
As much as $6 billion worth of power was pirated across America every year. Only cars and credit cards got stolen more.
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She remembered taking a chance on this family, feeling sorry for the mother who had told Sherrena she was trying to leave her abusive boyfriend. Sherrena had decided to rent to her and her children even though the woman had been evicted three times in the past two years. “There’s me having a heart again,” she thought.
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2. MAKING RENT
Between 1979 and 1983, Milwaukee’s manufacturing sector lost more jobs than during the Great Depression—about 56,000 of them.
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devastated Milwaukee’s black workers, half of whom held manufacturing jobs. When plants closed, they tended to close in the inner city, where black Milwaukeeans lived. The black poverty rate rose to 28 percent in 1980. By 1990, it had climbed to 42 percent.
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He cleaned the basement alone, working until his stubs grew too sore. It took him a week. Sherrena credited him $50 for it.
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the last forty years had witnessed the professionalization of property management. Since 1970, the number of people primarily employed as property managers had more than quadrupled.
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Sherrena wanted them to know that she could help. For the right price, she would manage their property or consult with them about where to buy in the ghetto; she would be their broker to black Milwaukee.
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3. HOT WATER
Milwaukeeans used to joke that the Sixteenth Street Viaduct, which stretches over the valley, was the longest bridge in the world because it connected Africa to Poland.
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They walked the Sixteenth Street Viaduct for two hundred consecutive nights. The city, then the nation, then the world took notice. Little changed.
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legislators backed by real estate lobbies refused to get behind his open housing law, which would have criminalized housing discrimination.
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Tobin once forgot that a tenant paid a year’s worth of rent in advance after winning a workers’ compensation claim. Trailer park residents had a word for this: being “Tobined.” Most chalked this up to old age or forgetfulness, though Tobin was only forgetful in one direction.
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Her monthly check was $714. Her monthly rent was $550, utilities not included. Larraine had been late with the rent several times before Tobin finally took her to court. “It’s just hard to give up that rent,” Larraine admitted. “You’ve got to wonder if the street people don’t have the right idea. Just live on the street. Don’t have to pay rent to nobody.”
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4. A BEAUTIFUL COLLECTION
The council had agreed to let Tobin keep his license only if he took drastic steps to improve the park, including forcing the troublemakers out. When city or state officials pressured landlords—by ordering them to hire an outside security firm or by having a building inspector scrutinize their property—landlords often passed the pressure on to their tenants.
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When owners were evicted and inevitably left their trailer behind, Tobin would reclaim it as “abandoned property” and give it to someone else.
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At the time that Pam was facing eviction, all but twenty trailers in the park were owner-occupied. The only benefit to owning your trailer was psychological.
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Tobin huffed when Office Susie told him that Pam and Ned were staying with Scott and Teddy. He had agreed to rent Scott and Teddy’s trailer to Scott and Teddy, nobody else. Tobin gave Scott and Teddy an eviction notice, tacking on Pam and Ned’s rental debt to Scott and Teddy’s bill. Eviction could be contagious that way.
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5. THIRTEENTH STREET
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One day on a whim, Arleen stopped by the Housing Authority and asked about the List. A woman behind the glass told her, “The List is frozen.” On it were over 3,500 families who had applied for rent assistance four years earlier.
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Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.
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If Arleen wanted public housing, she would have to save a month’s worth of income to repay the Housing Authority for leaving her subsidized apartment without giving notice; then wait two to three years until the List unfroze; then wait another two to five years until her application made it to the top of the pile; then pray to Jesus that the person with the stale coffee and heavy stamp reviewing her file would somehow overlook the eviction record she’d collected while trying to make ends meet in the private housing market on a welfare check.
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“Arleen, this is Sherrena calling. I’m calling to find out if you had your rent. Remember we agreed that you were going to pay a little bit over to get caught up with the three twenty you owed for—” Sherrena stopped herself from finishing the sentence with “your sister’s funeral costs.” She went on: “Um, I will be expecting the six hundred and fifty. Go ’head and give me a call.”
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Even if Arleen signed over her entire welfare check each month, she would still be short. But Sherrena was betting that Arleen could put in a few calls to family members or nonprofit agencies. Arleen took the deal because she had no other option.
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6. RAT HOLE
After Patrice received Sherrena’s eviction papers and moved herself and her children from their upper unit to the downstairs apartment where Doreen lived with Natasha, C.J., and Ruby, all eight Hinkstons (and Coco) found themselves living together in a small, cramped space.
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The Hinkstons treated the refrigerator, sour-smelling and sitting tomblike in the kitchen, like they treated the entire apartment: as something to endure, to outlast. It was how they saw the mattresses and small love seat too, each deep-burrowed with so many roaches they planned to leave them all behind when they moved out.
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the police called Child Protective Services, who called the Department of Neighborhood Services (DNS), who dispatched a building inspector, who issued orders to the landlord, who filled out a five-day eviction notice, citing unpaid rent.
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Eviction had a way of causing not one move but two: a forced move into degrading and sometimes dangerous housing and an intentional move out of it. But the second move could be a while coming.
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“I don’t even go to anybody’s houses, like I used to,” Doreen said about her new neighborhood. “I used to get up and go to visitors. Now I just…stand around.” When winter set in, weeks would pass without Doreen so much as stepping outside.
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displacement contributed directly to what Jacobs called “perpetual slums,” churning environments with high rates of turnover and even higher rates of resentment and disinvestment. “The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out.”
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With Doreen’s eviction, Thirty-Second Street lost a steadying presence—someone who loved and invested in the neighborhood, who contributed to making the block safer—but Wright Street didn’t gain one.
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Whether Quentin intentionally behaved this way to discourage tenants from calling him with housing problems was hard to say, but it had that effect.
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When Doreen finally did call Sherrena about the plumbing, she could not get ahold of her. After a week of voice messages, Sherrena called back, explaining that she and Quentin had been away in Florida. They had recently purchased a three-bedroom vacation condo there. In response to Doreen’s complaint about the plumbing, Sherrena reminded her tenant that she was breaking the terms of her lease by allowing Patrice and her children to live with her.
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Because the rent took almost all of their paycheck, families sometimes had to initiate a necessary eviction that allowed them to save enough money to move to another place. One landlord’s loss was another’s gain.
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A mere $270 separated some of the cheapest units in the city from some of the most expensive.
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The poor did not crowd into slums because of cheap housing. They were there—and this was especially true of the black poor—simply because they were allowed to be.
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In Sherrena’s portfolio, her worst properties yielded her biggest returns.
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Doreen and Patrice didn’t expect much from Malik, not because of anything he had done, but because of their own experiences with men. Patrice’s and Natasha’s fathers had left Doreen; Ruby and C.J.’s daddy was in prison. The fathers of Patrice’s children played a negligible role in their lives, and her current boyfriend had recently put her through the dining-room table. Doreen and Patrice did not see why a man needed to be involved in family decisions about where to raise a child,
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7. THE SICK
He never did credit checks, because there was a fee, and he didn’t call previous landlords because he figured most applicants just listed their mothers or friends. Lenny’s screening consisted mainly of typing names into CCAP.
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provided a website that catalogued all speeding tickets, child support disputes, divorces, evictions, felonies, and other legal business. Eviction records and misdemeanors were displayed for twenty years; felonies were displayed for at least fifty. CCAP also reported dismissed evictions and criminal charges. If someone was arrested but never convicted, CCAP displayed the violation with the disclaimer: “These charges were not proven and have no legal effect. [Name] is presumed innocent.” Employers and landlords could come to their own conclusions.
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“What’s the number one rule in real estate? Location, location, location,” Karen said. “What’s the number one rule for being a landlord? Screening, screening, screening…
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“You need to require sufficient and verifiable income. If they say they are self-employed, well, drug dealers are self-employed.”
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The small act of screening could have big consequences. From thousands of yes/no decisions emerged a geography of advantage and disadvantage that characterized the modern American city: good schools and failing ones, safe streets and dangerous ones. Landlords were major players in distributing the spoils.
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Neighborhoods marred by high poverty and crime were that way not only because poverty could incite crime, and crime could invite poverty, but also because the techniques landlords used to “keep illegal and destructive activity out of rental property” kept poverty out as well. This also meant that violence, drug activity, deep poverty, and other social problems coalesced at a much smaller, more acute level than the neighborhood. They gathered at the same address.
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“This is myyy property!” Karen boomed, her finger pointing to the land below. The voices in the room went up in unison, a proud and powerful chorus: “This is my property! Myyyyy property!”
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8. CHRISTMAS IN ROOM 400
December 23, which would be the last eviction court before Christmas that year. Sherrena knew the courthouse would be packed. Many parents chose to take their chances with their landlords rather than face their children empty-handed on Christmas morning.
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Sherrena had called Arleen that morning to remind her about court. She didn’t have to, but she had a soft spot for Arleen. Plus, Sherrena worried more about the commissioners. She thought they were sympathetic to tenants and tried to block landlords with technicalities.
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Roughly 70 percent of tenants summoned to Milwaukee’s eviction court didn’t come. The same was true in other major cities. In some urban courts, only 1 tenant in 10 showed. Some tenants couldn’t miss work or couldn’t find child care or were confused by the whole process or couldn’t care less or would rather avoid the humiliation.
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In a typical month, 3 in 4 people in Milwaukee eviction court were black. Of those, 3 in 4 were women. The total number of black women in eviction court exceeded that of all other groups combined. Children of all ages encircled these women.
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If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.
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“I know, baby. If I had a business, I would feel the same way…
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Arleen’s eviction record was not as extensive as it should have been. Through the years, she had given landlords different names; nothing exotic, just subtle alterations. Now “Arleen Beal” and “Erleen Belle” had eviction records. The frazzled court clerks, like many landlords, never stopped to ask for identification.
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money judgments were listed on eviction records. An eviction record listing $200 of rental debt left a different impression than one listing $2,000. Money judgments could also suddenly reappear in tenants’ lives several years after the eviction, particularly if landlords docketed them.
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To landlords, docketing a judgment was a long-odds bet on a tenant’s future. Who knows, maybe somewhere down the line a tenant would want to get her credit in order and would approach her old landlord, asking to repay the debt. “Debt with interest,” the landlord could respond, since money judgments accrued interest at an annual rate that would be the envy of any financial portfolio: 12 percent.
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Like landlords docketing judgments, the company took the long view, waiting for tenants to “get back on their financial feet and begin to earn a living” before collection could begin. Rent Recovery Service “never closed an unpaid file.” Some of those files contained debt amounts calculated in a reasonable and well-documented way; others contained bloated second and third causes and unreasonably high interest rates. But since both had the court’s approval, Rent Recovery Service did not distinguish between them.
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She thought of the broken window, the sporadic hot water, the grimy carpet, and said, in a dismissive voice, “I would say something, but I’m not even gonna go there. I’m all right.” That was her defense.
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PART TWO: OUT
9. ORDER SOME CARRYOUT
to qualify you also had to have dependent children in your home; so Emergency Assistance was out.
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to qualify for that benefit, you not only had to have experienced a loss of income, you also had to demonstrate that your current income could cover future rents. Plus, you needed landlord buy-in, which Larraine didn’t have. Like Emergency Assistance, this service was reserved more for the unlucky—those who had been laid off or mugged—than the chronically rent burdened.
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Larraine shrugged. The line to the Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Center—the “welfare building”—was always busy.
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company employed thirty-five people, most of them full-time movers; owned a fleet of vans and eighteen-foot trucks; and operated out of a three-story, 108,000-square-foot building that had originally held a furniture factory. Forty percent of their business came from eviction moves.
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Before a landlord could activate the Sheriff’s Office, he had to contract with a bonded moving company. There were four such companies in Milwaukee, Eagle being the largest.
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Sheriff John looked to the sky as it began to rain and then looked back at Tim. “Snowstorm. Rainstorm. We don’t give a shit,” Tim said, lighting a Salem.
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Dave’s assessment was subtler. He thought a kind of collective denial set in among tenants facing eviction, as if they were unable to accept or imagine that one day soon, two armed sheriff’s deputies would show up, order them out, and usher in a team of movers
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“There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessities of life to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the effort….The evil day of reckoning is put off till a to-morrow that may never come. When it does come…it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the cradle by such incidents.”
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after sixteen years together, Glen was gone. Larraine dropped the phone and screamed out his name. “I died right then and there,” she said. “My heart fell apart. My body fell apart, my whole being….When he died, it’s like my whole life fell into a hole, and I haven’t been able to get out ever since.”
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Tim recognized one child as the daughter of a man who used to work on the crew. It wasn’t uncommon to evict someone you knew. Most of the movers lived on the North Side and had at some point experienced the awkward moment of packing up someone from their church or block. Tim had evicted his own daughter.
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the name on the eviction order belonged to the mother of several of the children. She had died two months earlier, and the children had simply gone on living in the house, by themselves.
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Those who smoked reached for their packs. They didn’t know where the children would go, and they didn’t ask.
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With this job, you saw things. The guy with 10,000 audiocassette tapes of UFO activity who kept yelling, “Everything is in order! Everything is in order!” The woman with jars full of urine. The guy who lived in the basement while his pack of Chihuahuas overran the house. Just a week earlier, a man had told Sheriff John to give him a minute. Then he shut the door and shot himself in the head. But the squalor was what got under your skin; its smells and sights were what you tried to drink away after your shift.
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when family members with money grew exhausted by repeated requests, they sometimes withheld support for long periods of time, pegging their relatives’ misfortunes to individual failings. This was one reason why family members in the best position to help were often not asked to do so.
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When Jayme went to prison, she gave Larraine her car and $500 to care for it. But not long after that, Larraine sold the car and used the $500 to pay a bill. Larraine had done a similar thing to Megan, her eldest daughter, borrowing money and failing to pay it back. This was the main reason Megan had not spoken to Larraine in years. Jayme couldn’t hold that kind of grudge.
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Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11 percent reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31 percent of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent.
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Now she was wandering through the halls aimlessly, almost drunkenly. Her face had that look. The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours.
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“She made some stupid choices, spending her money foolishly….Making her go without for a while may be the best thing for her, so that she can be reminded, ‘Hey when I make foolish choices there are consequences.’ ” It was easy to go on about helping “the poor.” Helping a poor person with a name, a face, a history, and many needs, a person whose mistakes and lapses of judgment you have recorded—that was a more trying matter.
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Landlords showed considerable discretion over whether to move forward with an eviction, extending leniency to some and withdrawing it from others.
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Women tended not to negotiate their eviction like men did, and they were more likely to avoid landlords when they fell behind. These responses did not serve them well.
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Larraine rang up social services and begged family members. Jerry went straight to the man who had initiated the eviction. And it worked: Tobin later dismissed his eviction. Larraine’s plan could work only if a local nonprofit organization, her family, or her church came through.
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Men often avoided eviction by laying concrete, patching roofs, or painting rooms for landlords. But women almost never approached their landlord with a similar offer. Some women—already taxed by child care, welfare requirements, or work obligations—could not spare the time. But many others simply did not conceive of working off the rent as a possibility. When women did approach their landlords with such an offer, it sometimes involved trading sex for rent.
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New management would institute a new system—a cleaner, more professional, and fairer way of running the park. In other words, things were about to get much worse.
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The piles were stacked to eye level and individually encircled in shrink-wrap like so many silken-wound insects on a spider’s web. Up close, the contents were visible through the taut clear wrapping: scratched-up furniture, lamps, bathroom scales, and everywhere children’s things—rocking horses, strollers, baby swings, bouncy seats. The Brittain brothers thought of the warehouse as a “giant stomach,” digesting the city.
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If she fell ninety days behind, Eagle would get rid of her pile to make room for a new one. This was the fate of roughly 70 percent of lots confiscated in evictions or foreclosures.
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When the work was done, Larraine gave each boy $5 and sat alone in Beaker’s trailer, swatting away fruit flies. She swallowed pain pills, including 200 milligrams of Lyrica. In silence, she let the painkillers work. Once they had, she looked around at the clutter, the foulness, and the pile of things the movers had considered junk. Larraine let out a muffled scream and began punching the couch over and over and over again.
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10. HYPES FOR HIRE
“Hypes!” Lamar shouted. “Hypes done messed up everything. It’s hard to even sell a bus pass at the right price….I had to argue with her to get that job for two sixty. She got guys that’ll do it for a hundred. The whoooole thing. Drywall and all.”
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Like many inner-city landlords, Sherrena and Quentin tried to limit the number of appliances in their units. If you didn’t include a stove or refrigerator, you didn’t have to fix it when it broke.
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11. THE ’HOOD IS GOOD
[Social worker] Tabatha made a mistake, telling Sherrena that Doreen was looking for another place. Sherrena got off the phone and headed for the courthouse.
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“See. See! He got money for a new computer but not for the rent. That’s okay. ’Cause I got ’em. The rent’s going up.” Sherrena paused for effect. “Inflation!” Laughter filled the Suburban as it pulled onto the street.
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A tenant had recently pointed to Quentin’s bling and said, “You just want to collect my rent to live your own life.” When he relayed this story to Sherrena, she shrugged and said, “How else we supposed to do it?” To live, she meant.
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Sherrena and Quentin didn’t accept rent assistance in most of their properties because they didn’t want to deal with the program’s picky inspectors. “Rent assistance is a pain in the ass,” Sherrena said. Voucher holders made up a small share of the market anyway—only 6 percent of renter households in the city—and were not worth the headache.
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the program did not bring about large gains in racial or economic integration. Voucher holders more or less stayed put, upgrading to slightly nicer trailer parks or moving to quieter ghetto streets. It could, however, bring about large gains for landlords.
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Because rents were higher in the suburbs than in the inner city, the FMR exceeded market rent in disadvantaged neighborhoods. When voucher holders lived in those neighborhoods, landlords could charge them more than what the apartment would fetch on the private market.
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planning on charging Ladona $775 a month, $100 more than the average rent for similar units but still well below the FMR limit.
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Ladona didn’t mind. With a voucher, what she paid was a function of her income, not Sherrena’s rent. Her rental expense wasn’t affected; the taxpayers’ bill was.
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real estate interests kept lobbying for vouchers and were joined by numerous other groups of various political persuasions, including civil rights activists who thought vouchers would advance racial integration.
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In policy circles, vouchers were known as a “public-private partnership.” In real estate circles, they were known as “a win.”
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Since the foreclosure crisis, Sherrena had been buying properties throughout the North Side at a rate of about one a month.
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“If you have money right now”—that was the rub.
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Landlords, naturally, were more succinct. “Banks went from stupid to stupid,” their assessment went, meaning that banks had spun an about-face, going from being reckless to overly cautious.
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The same thing that made homeownership a bad investment in poor, black neighborhoods—depressed property values—made landlording there a potentially lucrative one.
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if you do low-income, you get a steady monthly income. You don’t buy properties for their appreciative value. You’re not in it for the future but for now.”
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“Who’s that?” a gruff voice barked. “It’s the landlord.” “Oh,” the voice said, resigned. “That’s right,” Sherrena whispered to herself as the locks came undone.
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When Doreen told Patrice the reason Sherrena had given for the plumbing being neglected—Quentin had lent someone his truck for a month—Patrice rolled her eyes. “You’re in Jamaica,” she said, “and we can’t even take baths….All that money they got, she sound dumb. If I believe that, then slap me dead.”
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Arleen sat down next to Jori and tried to explain herself. “What kind of parent am I to just listen to her and not listen to you?” she said, softly. “But this is what comes when you lose your house. This is what comes.”
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13. E-24
This was a common practice—outsider landlords hiring people from the community, usually their tenants, to manage property.
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What Donny, Robbie, and the rest of the trailer park didn’t know was that Lenny had a financial stake in them paying. Each month, he received a $100 bonus if he collected $50,000. He’d receive an additional $100 for every $2,000 collected after that.
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“I’m not going to write you up on that,” Roger replied, speaking of the cracked windows. He knew cataloguing every code violation was neither feasible nor, he suspected, in the tenants’ best interest.
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Not long after taking over the trailer park, Bieck Management fired Lenny and Susie.
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Bieck Management replaced Lenny with a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. At twenty-three, young enough to be Lenny’s son, the replacement was clueless and patronizing, but he stuck it out. The new maintenance man quit after a week
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Tobin took home roughly $447,000 each year, half of what the alderman had reported. Still, Tobin belonged to the top 1 percent of income earners. Most of his tenants belonged to the bottom 10 percent.
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14. HIGH TOLERANCE
“I want to come home clean and leave the house clean. I can’t see myself at thirty doing this bullshit.” Scott couldn’t either, years ago, when he was D.P.’s age.
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he had come to view sympathy as a kind of naïveté, a sentiment voiced from a certain distance by the callow middle classes. “They can be compassionate because it’s not their only option,” he said of liberals who didn’t live in trailer parks.
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Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They “helped get rid of the riffraff,” some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.
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They were not an especially radical bunch, these strikers. Most were ordinary mothers and fathers who believed landlords were entitled to modest rent increases and fair profits, but not “price gouging.”
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In New York City, the great rent wars of the Roaring Twenties forced a state legislature to impose rent controls that remain the country’s strongest to this day.
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Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them—which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.
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During rent strikes, tenants believed they had a moral obligation to one another. If tenants resisted excessive rent hikes or unwarranted evictions, it was because they invested in their homes and neighborhoods. They felt they belonged there. In the trailer park, that sentiment was almost dead. For most residents, Scott among them, the goal was to leave, not to plant roots and change things. Some residents described themselves as “just passing through,” even if they had been passing through nearly all their life.
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for such vital exchanges to take place, residents had to make their needs known and acknowledge their failures.
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for the most part, tenants had a high tolerance for inequality. They spent little time questioning the wide gulf separating their poverty from Tobin’s wealth or asking why rent for a worn-out aluminum-wrapped trailer took such a large chunk of their income. Their focus was on smaller, more tangible problems.
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There was always something worse than the trailer park, always room to drop lower.
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She knew none of it. Scott hadn’t spoken to his mother in over a year. “Mom,” Scott was crying. “I’m sorry. I’m a mess. I’m a fucking mess.” Before Scott could finish, his mother cut him off, failing to realize that it took everything he had in him (and a twelve-pack) to dial all ten numbers and not hang up when he got to the seventh or ninth, like he usually did. She explained that she was in a van full of relatives and unable to talk at the moment.
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15. A NUISANCE
Or the absentee landlord who failed to screen his tenants? Didn’t he play a role in creating the drug house? The police and courts increasingly answered yes. It was in this context that the nuisance property ordinance was born, allowing police departments to penalize landlords for the behavior of their tenants.
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In white neighborhoods, only 1 in 41 properties that could have received a nuisance citation actually did receive one. In black neighborhoods, 1 in 16 eligible properties received a citation.
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In the vast majority of cases (83 percent), landlords who received a nuisance citation for domestic violence responded by either evicting the tenants or by threatening to evict them for future police calls.
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presented battered women with a devil’s bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction.
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16. ASHES ON SNOW
Quentin keyed the computer to see if the fire had made the news. It had. “Firefighters did not hear smoke detectors when they arrived,” he read. “There is a smoke detector in the kitchen,” he said. “There’s supposed to be one in each sleeping area,” Sherrena replied. “I thought we had put some smoke detectors up there. I can’t remember right now.”
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PART THREE: AFTER
17. THIS IS AMERICA
The local news kept flashing a warning: FROSTBITE TIME: 10 MINUTES. People were urged to stay inside. Arleen had three days to find another apartment.
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Arleen remembered that she had bought a $5 adapter that connected the stove to the gas line. She told Jori to remove the part, which would have rendered the stove useless. Seeing this, Crystal screamed, “Get out of my house!” She began picking up Arleen’s things and throwing them out the front door.
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Under better circumstances, they could have been friends. They got on when there was food in their bellies and some certainty about the next day. But Arleen was in the press of the city, depleted. So when Crystal exploded, Arleen exploded right alongside her.
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18. LOBSTER ON FOOD STAMPS
After one hour and forty minutes, Larraine’s number was called. Not bad, she thought, having spent entire days in the welfare building.
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Sometimes, family members who didn’t know any better would ask Larraine why she didn’t just call to schedule her appointments. Larraine would laugh and ask, “Oh, you want to try the number?” She had never once gotten anything but a busy signal.
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She was allowed to have up to $2,000 in the bank, not $1,000 like she thought, but anything more than that could result in her losing benefits. Larraine saw this rule as a clear disincentive to save. “If I can’t keep my money in the bank, then I might as well buy something worthwhile…because I know once I pay on it, it’s mine, and no one can take it from me, just like my jewelry.” Well, no one except Eagle Moving.
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“I worked way too hard for me to sell my jewelry….I’m not going to sell my life savings because I’m homeless or I got evicted.” It wasn’t like she had just stumbled into a pit and would soon climb out. Larraine imagined she would be poor and rent-strapped forever. And if that was to be her lot in life, she might as well have a little jewelry to show for it.
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To Sammy, Pastor Daryl, and others, Larraine was poor because she threw money away. But the reverse was more true. Larraine threw money away because she was poor.
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People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty.
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most of the properties were reserved for the physically disabled or elderly. In fact, for years Larraine had assumed that most public housing was exclusively for senior citizens. “And even they, a lot of them, couldn’t get low-income housing,” she remembered. “So I thought, if they can’t, neither can I.” It was why Larraine had never before thought to apply for public housing.
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hated the idea of senior housing a lot less than public housing for poor families. Grandma and Grandpa made for a much more sympathetic case, and elderly housing provided adult children with an alternative to nursing homes. When public housing construction for low-income households ceased, it continued for the aged; and high-rises originally built for families were converted for elderly use.
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Larraine had applied to or called on forty apartments. She had had no luck on the private market, and her applications to public housing were still being processed. Larraine didn’t know where she was going to go.
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Ms. Betty, whom Larraine knew only as an “old lady who lives across the road.”
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But when Larraine asked Betty if she could stay with her, Betty said yes.
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In the kitchen, Betty had hung a sign: SELF-CONTROL IS DEFINED AS REFRAINING FROM CHOKING THE SHIT OUT OF SOMEONE WHO IS DESPERATELY DESERVING OF IT.
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19. LITTLE
Job loss could lead to eviction, but the reverse was also true.
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She was beginning to wonder what was most responsible for keeping them homeless: her drug conviction from several years back, the fact that Ned was on the run and had no proof of income, their eviction record, their poverty, or their children.
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When Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, it did not consider families with children a protected class, allowing landlords to continue openly turning them away or evicting them.
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Congress finally outlawed housing discrimination against children and families, but as Pam found out, the practice remained widespread. Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.
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She was grasping, experimenting, trying out altered stories at random. Arleen wouldn’t know how to game the system if she wanted to.
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On the application, next to “Previous landlord?” Arleen wrote, “Sherrena Tarver.” Next to “Reasons for moving?” she decided on “Slumlord.”
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Both boys would later rejoin Arleen, but Boosie and Arleen’s other two children from Larry remained in the system. Arleen didn’t know why.
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On the front door a sign was posted: THIS BUILDING IS ILLEGALLY OCCUPIED OR UNFIT FOR HUMAN HABITATION AND SHALL BE VACATED. “God, I miss living at this house,” Arleen said.
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Pam would rather have given a landlord everything she had than live on a block where most of her neighbors weren’t white.
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“That’s okay,” Ned said, looking up and down the block. “I can live with the Mexicans. But not with the niggers. They’re pigs.” He grinned, remembering. “Eh, Pam, what’s a name you never want to call a black person? I’ll give you a hint, it starts with an n and ends with an r….Neighbor!”
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told Pam and Ned that their application had been approved. Pam had two evictions on her record, was a convicted felon, and received welfare. Ned had an outstanding warrant, no verifiable income, and a long record that included three evictions, felony drug convictions, and several misdemeanors like reckless driving and carrying a concealed weapon. They had five daughters. But they were white.
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The best she could do was to tell her girls, when they were alone, that Ned was the devil. Some nights, before she fell asleep, Pam wondered if she should take her girls to a homeless shelter or under the viaduct.
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When Arleen was alone, she sometimes cried for Little. But she was teaching her sons to love small, to reject what they could not have. Arleen was protecting them, and herself.
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If a poor father failed his family, he could leave the way Larry did, try again at some point down the road. Poor mothers—most of them, anyway—had to embrace this failure, to live with it.
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You could only say “I’m sorry, I can’t” so many times before you began to feel worthless, edging closer to a breaking point. So you protected yourself, in a reflexive way, by finding ways to say “No, I won’t.” I cannot help you. So, I will find you unworthy of help.
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20. NOBODY WANTS THE NORTH SIDE
Only 15 percent of black renters looking for housing relied on the Internet. By not consulting print or online listings, Crystal and Vanetta constricted their options to what they could see with their own eyes, often from a foggy bus window.
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Urban landlords quickly realized that piles of money could be made by creating slums
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Beginning in the sixteenth century, slum housing would be reserved not only for outcasts, beggars, and thieves but for a large segment of the population.
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In the early decades of the twentieth century, African-American families seeking freedom and good jobs participated in the Great Migration, moving en masse from the rural South to cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. When they arrived in those cities, they were crowded into urban ghettos, and the vast majority depended on landlords for housing.
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In 1930, the death rate for Milwaukee’s blacks was nearly 60 percent higher than the citywide rate, due in large part to poor housing conditions.
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The profits were staggering. In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landlord simply replied, “That’s why I bought the building.”
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Crystal considered her phone. It was almost eleven o’clock at night. She dialed a number. Her cousin who owed her didn’t pick up. She dialed a number. Her foster-care mother said her house was full. She dialed a number. She dialed and dialed and dialed and dialed.
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21. BIGHEADED BOY
It was once said that the poor are “constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.”
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People who were repulsed by their home, who felt they had no control over it, and yet had to give most of their income to it—they thought less of themselves.
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When the baby stirred, he was passed around, though Natasha had a hard time letting him go. All day long, she lifted him to her and kissed him softly on the nose and forehead. Patrice noticed Malik’s proud face and decided then and there to name the baby Malik Jr. The next day, Natasha swaddled her tiny, cherished boy and took him back to the rat hole.
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22. IF THEY GIVE MOMMA THE PUNISHMENT
He returned later, drunk, smashed the door down, and beat her. After that incident, Vanetta remembered the landlord taking her rent money with one hand and handing her a twenty-eight-day “no cause” eviction notice with the other.
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Then there was Kendal’s upcoming preschool graduation. Vanetta wanted to somehow find money to buy him a new pair of shoes for the big day. She wanted him to feel special, accomplished. In the inner city, much was made of early milestones. Later ones might never come.
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“Momma,” Kendal said, “kids aren’t supposed to go to court. They’re supposed to go to day care and school.” He wasn’t pouting. He was observing some strangeness in the world, a misalignment. He could have been saying, “Dogs aren’t supposed to like cats,” or “It’s not supposed to snow in April.”
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And if it was poverty that caused this crime, who’s to say you won’t do it again? Because you were poor then and you are poor now. We all see the underlying cause, we see it every day in this court, but the justice system is no charity, no jobs program, no Housing Authority. If we cannot pull the weed up from the roots, then at least we can cut it low at the stem.
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“Oh, God,” Shortcake let out. She shook Kendal awake and took him to the glass. “Wave goodbye, son.” Hands behind her back, Vanetta turned around, tears streaming down her cheeks. Kendal stared back stone-faced, strong, just like his momma had taught him.
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Crystal had always believed that SSI was a more secure income source than a paycheck. You couldn’t get fired from SSI; your hours couldn’t get cut. “SSI always come,” she said. Until one day it didn’t.
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Because she didn’t know what else to do, Crystal went “on the stroll” and began selling sex. She had never been a morning person but soon learned that it was the best time to turn tricks, catching men on their way to work.
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23. THE SERENITY CLUB
David and Anna’s working-class home was one of those places that seemed to belong to everybody. People would walk through the door without knocking and open the refrigerator without asking. “This is the Aldea Recovery House,” Anna would say. “If somebody’s not here, somebody’s calling.” She kept large bowls of rice and beans on hand and never locked the door.
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A barrel-chested Puerto Rican man with pinched eyes and a ready grin, sometimes David paid Scott and sometimes he didn’t. Scott didn’t complain. How could he, after what David and Anna had done for him?
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he would dream about returning to nursing. He thought that would be a “great way to stay sober because you start thinking about other people and not your poor, pathetic shit.”
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The nursing board didn’t just take Scott’s license away. Understandably, it made it extremely difficult for him to earn it back. He would have to submit to “the testing of urine specimens at a frequency of not less than 56 times per year,” which would cost thousands of dollars. He’d have to stay clean for five years and attend biweekly AA meetings. Scott recognized his weaknesses. He didn’t know if he would have tried harder to get clean years ago if the nursing board had not put license reinstatement so far out of reach. But giving up did come easier when things seemed impossible.
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One nurse said it had taken her over a year to find a job after being sober for about two years and passing all the requirements.
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to get a nursing job with a restricted license—one that didn’t allow you to handle narcotics, say—was rare.
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staying in touch with these people had meant hiding his addiction and poverty, so approaching them for help was complicated.
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At least when he was a junkie, his life had purpose: get dope. Now he felt as though he were pacing in a small, dull loop.
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The unselfish thing to do, in Scott’s mind, was to allow Oscar to keep using so that he could be there for his girlfriend and baby daughter.
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Scott thought the most diverse place in all of Milwaukee had to be the methadone clinic at seven a.m.
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A year and almost $4,700 later, the county agreed to help Scott pay for his methadone, lowering his monthly bill to $35.
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During that time, Scott often thought about killing himself. He’d have done it with a monster hit of heroin; but he never could find enough money.
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24. CAN’T WIN FOR LOSING
When things looked bleak, he would try to make his momma smile by freestyling (badly) as the city rolled past their bus window. Aye, aye, aye Looking for me a house to move in. That was my old school. That’s my old block. That’s my old gas station. We looking for a house.
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Through it all, Arleen was embraced and kissed and welcomed. She felt held by her people. They weren’t much help if you needed a place to stay or money to keep the heat on, but they knew how to throw a funeral.
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Children didn’t shield families from eviction; they exposed them to it.
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Jafaris came home from school with braids on one side of his head. He watched the movers lugging out mattresses and dressers and shoving handfuls of clothes into black trash bags. To this scene, he had no reaction. He did not cry or ask a question or run to check on a special possession. He simply turned around and went outside.
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Epilogue: HOME AND HOPE
That low-income families move often is well known. Why they do is a question that has puzzled researchers and policymakers because they have overlooked the frequency of eviction in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
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Instability is not inherent to poverty. Poor families move so much because they are forced to.
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Among Milwaukee renters, over 1 in 5 black women report having been evicted in their adult life, compared with 1 in 12 Hispanic women and 1 in 15 white women.
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Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation.
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Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.
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In 2013, 1 percent of poor renters lived in rent-controlled units; 15 percent lived in public housing; and 17 percent received a government subsidy, mainly in the form of a rent-reducing voucher. The remaining 67 percent—2 of every 3 poor renting families—received no federal assistance. This drastic shortfall in government support, coupled with rising rent and utility costs alongside stagnant incomes, is the reason why most poor renting families today spend most of their income on housing.
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Today, over 1 in 5 of all renting families in the country spends half of its income on housing.
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Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.
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When the American labor movement rose up in the 1830s to demand higher wages, landed capital did not lock arms with industrial capital. Instead landlords rooted for the workers because higher wages would allow them to collect higher rents.
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There are two freedoms at odds with each other: the freedom to profit from rents and the freedom to live in a safe and affordable home.
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Expanding housing vouchers without stabilizing rent would be asking taxpayers to subsidize landlords’ profits.
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In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion.
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But for most of the four months I lived in it, I did not have hot water because, despite multiple requests, Tobin and Lenny neglected to fix the chimney to my water heater. They just didn’t get around to it, even though I told them I was a writer working on a book about them and their trailer park. If used, the water heater would have emitted carbon monoxide straight into the trailer.
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“No, Matt. You don’t know how dangerous it is.” Beaker chimed in: “They don’t cotton to white folks over there.” But the truth is that white people are afforded special privileges in the ghetto.
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“When you say ‘eviction,’ ” Rose explained, “I think of the sheriffs coming and throwing you out and changing your locks, and Eagle Movers tosses your stuff on the curb. That’s an eviction. We were not evicted.” If Rose and Tim had been asked during a survey, “Have you ever been evicted?,” they would have answered no. Accordingly, surveys that have posed this question vastly underestimate the prevalence of involuntary removal from housing.
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the presence of children in the household almost tripled a tenant’s odds of receiving an eviction judgment. The effect of living with children on receiving an eviction judgment was equivalent to falling four months behind in rent.
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Notes that link to this note