More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 4 - April 3, 2018
The rent would take 88 percent of Arleen’s $628-a-month welfare check. Maybe she could make it work. Maybe they could at least stay through winter, until crocuses and tulips stabbed through the thawed ground of spring, Arleen’s favorite season. There was a knock at the door. It was the landlord, Sherrena Tarver. Sherrena, a black woman with bobbed hair and fresh nails, was loaded down with groceries. She had spent $40 of her own money and picked up the rest at a food pantry.
Today, the 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.
In 2013, 1 in 8 poor renting families nationwide were unable to pay all of their rent, and a similar number thought it was likely they would be evicted soon.
Eviction reveals people’s vulnerability and desperation, as well as their ingenuity and guts.
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.
Most middle-class Milwaukeeans zoomed past the inner city on the freeway. Landlords took the side streets, typically not in their Saab or Audi but in their “rent collector,” some oil-leaking, rusted-out van or truck that hauled around extension cords, ladders, maybe a loaded pistol, plumbing snakes, toolboxes, a can of Mace, nail guns, and other necessities.
Some white Milwaukeeans still referred to the North Side as “the core,” as they did in the 1960s, and if they ventured into it, they saw street after street of sagging duplexes, fading murals, twenty-four-hour day cares, and corner stores with WIC ACCEPTED HERE signs.
Once America’s eleventh-largest city, Milwaukee’s population had fallen below 600,000, down from over 740,000 in 1960. It showed. Abandoned properties and weedy lots where houses once stood dotted the North Side. A typical residential street had a few single-family homes owned by older folks who tended gardens and hung American flags, more duplexes or four-family apartment buildings with chipping paint and bedsheet curtains rented to struggling families, and vacant plots and empty houses with boards drilled over their doors and windows. Sherrena saw all this, but she saw something else too.
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
There were no euphemisms either: no “downsizing,” no “quarterly losses.” Landlords took the gains and losses directly; they saw the deprivation and waste up close.
She learned that the rental population comprised some upper- and middle-class households who rent out of preference or circumstance, some young and transient people, and most of the city’s poor, who were excluded both from homeownership and public housing.1
Sherrena decided to specialize in renting to the black poor.
Four years later, she owned thirty-six units, all in the inner city, and took to carrying a pair of cell phones with backup batteries, reading Forbes, renting office space, and accepting appointments from nine a.m. to nine p.m. Quentin quit his job and started working as Sherrena’s property manager and buying buildings of his own. Sherrena started a credit-repair business and an investment business. She purchased two fifteen-passenger vans and started Prisoner Connections LLC, which for $25 to $50 a seat transported girlfriends and mothers and children to visit their incarcerated loved ones
...more
In a typical year, almost 1 in 5 poor renting families nationwide missed payments and received a disconnection notice from their utility company.4 Families who couldn’t both make rent and keep current with the utility company sometimes paid a cousin or neighbor to reroute the meter. As much as $6 billion worth of power was pirated across America every year. Only cars and credit cards got stolen more.
Many tenants who in the winter stayed current on their rent at the expense of their heating bill tried in the summer to climb back in the black with the utility company by shorting their landlord. Come the following winter, they had to be connected to benefit from the moratorium on disconnection. So every year in Milwaukee evictions spiked in the summer and early fall and dipped again in November, when the moratorium began.
Lamar was partnered with Buck. At eighteen, Buck was the oldest of the crew and went by Big Bro. They sat across from each other, playing Luke, Lamar’s sixteen-year-old son, and DeMarcus, one of Luke’s closest friends.
“Damn,” Lamar said. Then he looked back at Buck. “It ain’t worth it, doing stupid stuff….Prison ain’t no joke. You gotta fight every day in prison, for your life.” “I know. But when I get mad, to the extent that I wanna do something, ain’t nothing stoppin’ me.”
Lamar’s approach with his sons, and the boys he treated like sons, was open and avuncular. “You can’t hide nothing from God,” he told them, “so don’t hide it from your daddy. Do what you do at home….I’d rather for you to do it at home around me than out there on them street corners.” As Lamar smoked and laughed with the boys, he handed down advice about work, sex, drugs, cops, life.
Milwaukee used to be flush with good jobs. But throughout the second half of the twentieth century, bosses in search of cheap labor moved plants overseas or to Sunbelt communities, where unions were weaker or didn’t exist. Between 1979 and 1983, Milwaukee’s manufacturing sector lost more jobs than during the Great Depression—about 56,000 of them.
As President Clinton was fine-tuning his plan to “end welfare as we know it,” a conservative reformer by the name of Jason Turner was transforming Milwaukee into a policy experiment that captivated lawmakers around the country. Turner’s plan was dubbed Wisconsin Works (or W-2), and “works” was right: If you wanted a welfare check, you would have to work, either in the private sector or in a community job created by the state.
Lamar paused to take in the scene. Just the previous winter, he had climbed into an abandoned house, high on crack. When the high wore off, he found he couldn’t climb out; his feet had frozen.
Lenny Lawson stepped out of his trailer park office to burn a Pall Mall. Smoke drifted up past his mustache and light-blue eyes and disappeared above a baseball cap.
The Menominee River Valley cuts through the middle of the city and functions like its Mason-Dixon Line, dividing the predominantly black North Side from the predominantly white South Side.
A supermajority in both houses had helped President Johnson pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but legislators backed by real estate lobbies refused to get behind his open housing law, which would have criminalized housing discrimination. It took Martin Luther King Jr. being murdered on a Memphis balcony, and the riots that ensued, for Congress to include a real open housing measure later that year in the 1968 Civil Rights Act, commonly called the Fair Housing Act.
“Ha!” Mrs. Mytes said, walking out to start her day pushing a grocery cart and collecting cans. Mrs. Mytes paid the bills with her SSI check. She cashed in the cans to give her mentally challenged adult daughter snack money or, after a nice haul, a trip to Chuck E. Cheese’s.
The owner of the trailer park was named Tobin Charney. He lived seventy miles away, in Skokie, Illinois, but visited the trailer park every day except Sunday. He paid Office Susie $5 an hour and reduced her rent to $440. Tobin waived Lenny’s rent and paid him a salary of $36,000 a year, in cash. Tobin had a reputation for being flexible and understanding. But no one thought him a pushover.
Tobin also did not evict most tenants who owed him. Pushing tenants out and pulling new ones in cost money too. In an average month, forty of Tobin’s tenants were behind—nearly one-third of the trailer park. The average tenant owed $340.4 But Tobin only evicted a handful of tenants each month. A landlord could be too soft or too hard; the money was in the middle, with the third route, and his tenants were grateful for it, though often not at first.
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.1 There was also the matter of reestablishing control.
signing over the $1,200 check she had just received as part of Obama’s economic stimulus act. She thought it would be enough, mainly because she thought she owed $1,800. But Tobin said she owed something more like $3,000, and Office Susie told him Pam smoked crack. Tobin accepted Pam’s stimulus check but moved forward with the eviction anyway.
When Pam and Ned arrived at College Mobile Home Park, Tobin and Lenny offered them the “Handyman Special,” a free mobile home. Under this arrangement, tenants owned the trailers, and Tobin owned the ground underneath them. He charged the owners “lot rent,” which was equivalent to what his renters paid. But unlike the renters, families who owned their trailers were responsible for upkeep. In theory, a family could at any time move their trailer elsewhere. But the owners knew that in practice this was impossible. Towing expenses exceed $1,500 and setting up the trailer somewhere else could cost
...more
She and Bliss were the only black children in the trailer park. Once, one of their neighbors hung a Nazi flag in his front window. Lenny didn’t permit that, but he was okay with the Confederate flag as long as it was displayed underneath Old Glory.
She learned how to cook pots of spaghetti and macaroni salad. Her mother had died in a car accident when Pam was in high school and had never got around to teaching her. Her father hadn’t either; he spent a lot of time in prison on drug and drunk-driving charges.
Quad Graphics was in Sussex, a forty-minute drive from the trailer park. Pam relished the commute. It was her time, time away from Ned and the kids. Then her car gave out at the worst time—winter—when money was tightest. Ned had been working with a construction crew, which all but shut down in the colder months. They didn’t have enough money to repair the car, and Pam lost her job.
The days passed, and Arleen and her boys settled into their new home. After school, Jori sometimes challenged other neighborhood boys to a game of cans, Jafaris looking on. Using a basketball, Jori and his competitor tried to hit soda cans flattened on the sidewalk, earning more points for farther shots.
He wore his hair natural and had a relaxed, agreeable way about him. But Jori was fiercely loyal to his momma.
Jafaris’s father had given him his name, and lately Arleen had been worried he might have given him other things too. His father had “learning disabilities and anger issues,” and Jafaris was beginning to exhibit similar characteristics at school. He excelled at reading but struggled with other subjects, and he pushed his classmates around.
They were poor and in love, and soon Arleen was pregnant with another son. They named him after Larry but called him Boosie. Larry and Arleen had three more children after that, a daughter and two more sons, letting Arleen’s mother name their youngest. “Jori.”
When Larry walked out on her and the kids, Arleen was working at the Mainstay Suites, by the airport. In despair, she quit and began relying on welfare. Sometime later she found work cleaning the Third Street Pier restaurant, but then her mother died suddenly. The grief overwhelmed her, and she left that job too. She later regretted going back on welfare, but it was a dark time.
Most poor people in America were like Arleen: they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.
Belinda charged each client $37 a month for her services. When she met Sherrena, Belinda had 230 clients. What Belinda could offer Sherrena and other landlords was steady, reliable rental income, and what Belinda got in return was a growing customer base, which meant more money in her pocket.
Doreen was the mother hen. Broad-shouldered and broad-bellied, she was a moonfaced woman with glasses and dark-brown freckles flecking her lighter cheeks. For as long as she could remember, she had been overweight and tended to move slowly through her days.
The Hinkstons’ rear door was off its hinges. The walls were pockmarked with large holes. There was one bathroom. Its ceiling sagged from an upstairs leak, and a thin blackish film coated its floor. The kitchen windows were cracked. A few dining-room windows had disheveled miniblinds, broken and strung out in all directions. Patrice hung heavy blankets over the windows facing the street, darkening the house. A small television sat on a plywood dresser in the living room, next to a lamp with no shade.
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.2 But the second move could be a while coming.
“The public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.” So wrote Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
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.”
When Doreen phoned Sherrena to complain, she often found herself being complained about. “Every time we call about something,” Doreen said, “she tries to blame it on us, and say we broke it. I’m tired of hearing it….So, we just fix it every time it breaks.” “Fixing it” often meant getting on without it.
A mere $270 separated some of the cheapest units in the city from some of the most expensive. That meant that rent in some of the worst neighborhoods was not drastically cheaper than rent in much better areas. For example, in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where at least 40 percent of families lived below the poverty line, median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was only $50 less than the citywide median.10 Sherrena put it like this: “A two bedroom is a two bedroom is a two bedroom.”
As late as 1960, rent in major cities was higher for blacks than for whites in similar accommodations.11 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.
In Sherrena’s portfolio, her worst properties yielded her biggest returns.
But Doreen had carried the family on her back before, and Natasha believed she would do it again. “My momma, she strong,” Natasha said. “And she’s got us out of way worse situations than this. I mean, from shelters, livin’ on the street, churches, cars. I got a lot of faith in my momma. Yeah, we’ve been on the street a few times, but my momma, she always had it.”
Several months after Scott started taking Percocet, he discovered fentanyl. That was when he fell in love. Fentanyl penetrated the central nervous system 100 times more effectively than morphine.2 It offered Scott pure, calm happiness; it pulled him toward the sublime. “It was the best feeling of pleasure and contentment I have ever felt,” he said.
