Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  Lora recrossed her legs. “He’s a player, that’s all he is. Time for him to go….They just try to take, take, take, take, take.”

  “The thing is”—Sherrena circled back to Lamar’s painting job—“I would have never paid anybody two sixty to do that.”

  “I can get painting done in five rooms, thirty bucks a room, a hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “No, no, no. Our people do it for twenty dollars a room, twenty-five at the most.”

  “Exactly.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, he still owes the two sixty. Excuse me, now it’s two ninety.”

  The old friends laughed. It was just what Sherrena needed.

  3.

  HOT WATER

  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. He looked out over the rows of mobile homes bunched together on a skinny strip of asphalt. Almost all the trailers were lined up in the same direction and set a couple steps apart. The airport was close, and even longtime residents looked up when planes came in low, exposing their underbellies and rattling the windows. Lenny had spent his entire life in this place, all forty-three years of it, and for the past dozen years he had worked as its manager.

  Lenny knew the druggies lived mostly on the north side of the trailer park, and the people working double shifts at restaurants or nursing homes lived mostly on the south side. The metal scrappers and can collectors lived near the entrance, and the people with the best jobs—sandblasters, mechanics—congregated on the park’s snobby side, behind the office, in mobile homes with freshly swept porches and flowerpots. Those on SSI were sprinkled throughout, as were the older folks who “went to bed with the chickens and woke up with the chickens,” as some park residents liked to say. Lenny tried to house the sex offenders near the druggies, but it didn’t always work out. He had had to place one near the double shifters. Thankfully, the man never left his trailer or even opened the blinds. Someone delivered food and other necessities to him every week.

  College Mobile Home Park sat on the far South Side of the city, on Sixth Street, off College Avenue.1 It was bordered on one side by overgrown trees, shrubs, and sandpits and, on the other, by a large truck distribution center. It was a fifteen-minute walk to the nearest gas station or fast-food restaurant. There were other trailer parks nearby, surrounded by streets with modest tawny brick homes and sharply pitched roofs. This was the part of Milwaukee where poor white folks lived.

  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. 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. The biggest effort to change that came in 1967, when two hundred demonstrators, almost all of them black, gathered at the north end of the viaduct and began walking to Poland to protest housing discrimination. As the marchers approached the south side of the bridge, they heard the crowd before they saw it. Chants of “Kill! Kill!” and “We want slaves!” rose up above the rock-and-roll music blasted from loudspeakers. Then the crowd appeared, a deep swell of white faces, upwards of 13,000 by some counts. Onlookers hurled bottles, rocks, piss, and spit down on the marchers. The black demonstrators marched; the white mob pulsed and seethed—and then something released, some invisible barrier fell, and the white onlookers lurched forward, crashing down on the marchers. That’s when the police fired the tear gas.

  The marchers returned the next night, and the night after that. They walked the Sixteenth Street Viaduct for two hundred consecutive nights. The city, then the nation, then the world took notice. Little changed. A 1967 New York Times editorial declared Milwaukee “America’s most segregated city.” 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.2

  The white, working-class South Side had, since the 1930s, made room for a small number of Hispanic families, whose men had been recruited to work in the tanneries. In the 1970s, the Hispanic population began to grow. Instead of putting up another fight, whites began moving out, pushing farther south and west. Poland became Mexico, a small enclave on the near South Side of the city. The North Side remained black. The East and West Sides of the city, as well as the far South, where Lenny’s trailer park sat, belonged to the whites. Open housing law or not, Milwaukee would remain one of the most racially divided cities in the nation.3

  Lenny stamped out his cigarette and ducked back into the office, which was situated in the middle of the trailer park, near its only entrance and exit. It was a cramped and windowless space, paper-cluttered and lit by a naked bulb screwed into the ceiling. The old fax machine, calculator, and computer were covered with grease smudges. In the summer, a wet spot grew on the thin maroon carpet under the leaky air-conditioning unit. In the winter, a space heater buzzed softly on a plastic bucket. Over the years, Lenny had added some flourishes: stag antlers, a Pabst Blue Ribbon plaque, a poster of a flushed pheasant.

  “Hey,” Lenny greeted Susie as he took a seat behind his desk.

  Susie Dunn was on her feet, as usual, sorting mail into the mailboxes that made up one side of the office. She was not placing letters in their boxes as much as punching them in there, fast and hard. It was her way. When Susie smoked, she sucked the cigarette down, keeping her hand close to her mouth. She couldn’t talk without also sweeping or scrubbing or rearranging patio furniture. It was as if she’d fall over, like a toy top, if she stopped spinning. Susie’s husband liked to call her the Queen of the Trailer Park. Other people settled for Office Susie, so as not to confuse her with Heroin Susie.

  “Here’s your unemployment check,” Susie said to a letter. “Now, why don’t you pay some rent?…If she don’t pay her rent, she ain’t gonna be living here much longer. She can move back to the South Side or live in the ghetto.”

  The office door opened and in walked Mrs. Mytes, barefoot. At seventy-one, she was a taut and un-frail woman with a shock of cotton-white hair, a face crisscrossed with wrinkles, and no teeth.

  “Hey, granny,” Lenny said with a smile. He, like everyone else in the park, thought Mrs. Mytes was crazy.

  “Guess what I did today? I threw a bill in the garbage can!” Mrs. Mytes looked at him sidelong with her bunched-up face. She had almost yelled the words.

  “Hmm. Is that right?” Lenny answered, looking at her.

  “I’m no dummy!”

  “Hmm, well, I’ve got some bills for you. You can pay mine.”

  “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.

  Lenny grinned and went back to his paperwork until the door swung open again. People who got half an ear everywhere else got a full one from Lenny. It was up to him to keep track of rents and maintenance requests, to screen tenants and deliver eviction notices. But it was also up to him to listen to the trailer park, to know it—know who was current and who was behind, who was pregnant, who was mixing their methadone with Xanax, whose boyfriend had just been released. “Sometimes I’m a shrink,” he liked to say. “Sometimes I’m the village asshole.”

  —

  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 reduc
ed 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. A hard man with squinting eyes and an unsmiling face, he had a gruff, hurried way about him. He was seventy-one, the same age as Mrs. Mytes, and worked out regularly, keeping a gym bag in the trunk of his Cadillac. He was not chummy with his tenants or amused by them; he did not pause to ruffle their children’s hair. He did not pretend he was anything he was not. His father had been a landlord and at one point owned almost 600 units. All Tobin desired was one address and 131 trailers.

  But in the final week of May 2008, he found himself on the verge of losing them. All five members of Milwaukee’s Licenses Committee had refused to renew Tobin’s license to operate the trailer park. Alderman Terry Witkowski, a longtime South Sider with a pinkish face and silver hair, was leading the charge. Witkowski pointed to the 70 code violations that Neighborhood Services had documented in the past two years. He brought up the 260 police calls made from the trailer park in the previous year alone. He said the park was a haven for drugs, prostitution, and violence. He observed that an unconnected plumbing system had recently caused raw sewage to bubble up and spread under ten mobile homes. The Licenses Committee now considered the trailer park “an environmental biohazard.”

  On June 10, the city council, called the “Common Council” in Milwaukee, would vote. If the Licenses Committee’s decision stood, Tobin would be out of a job and his tenants would be out of a home. That’s when the newspeople showed up with gelled hair and shoulder-mounted cameras that looked like weapons. They interviewed residents, including some outspoken critics of Tobin.

  “The media paints us as ignorant half-breeds,” Mary was saying to Tina outside her trailer.

  “They said this was the ‘shame of the South Side,’ ” Tina replied.

  Both women had been in the park for years, and both had strong, windblown faces. “My son hasn’t slept because of this,” Mary went on. “Neither have I or my husband….You know, I work two jobs. I work hard. I mean, I can’t afford to go anywhere else.”

  Mrs. Mytes walked up and put her face right up next to Tina’s. Tina took a step back. “That son of a bitch!” Mrs. Mytes began. “I’m gonna call the alderman, and I’m gonna give him a piece of my mind! That son—”

  “See, but that won’t help,” Tina cut in.

  “I’m gonna go, and I’m gonna give that alderman a piece of my mind,” Mrs. Mytes replied. “That little son of a bitch!”

  Tina and Mary shook their heads as Mrs. Mytes stomped off. Then Mary turned serious. “And to be told to move to the North Side is not funny,” she said. “It’s not funny.” She shook a little and broke eye contact to keep from crying.

  That was the heart of it, what trailer park residents feared the most. When Mary and Tina and Mrs. Mytes and the whole trailer park talked about having to leave, what they were talking about was the possibility of having to move into the black ghetto. Office Susie was one of several residents who had previously lived on the North Side, where her adult son had had a gun stuck in his face. “The alderman said this is a ghetto slum,” she vented. “I’ll show you a ghetto!” The situation twisted Susie’s stomach so much that her son hid her pain pills, fearing she’d swallow a handful.

  The trailer park had ten days before the final vote. So tenants hosted a barbecue for the media, began calling local representatives, and started to recite what they would say to the Common Council. Rufus the junk collector, with his trim red beard and distant blue eyes, wrote up his comments and practiced. “And then I’ll say, ‘Who has been behind on their rent, five hundred dollars?’ And the hands will go up. And I could keep going: ‘Seven hundred? A thousand?’ And all the hands would go up.” Rufus planned to end his speech by saying, “This is no slumlord. This is not a bad man.”

  If his speech didn’t work and the trailer park was closed, Rufus was planning to put a reciprocating saw to the trailers and sell the aluminum.

  —

  Tobin worked with his tenants. He let them pay here and there. When tenants lost their jobs, he let some of them work off the rent. He would sometimes tell Lenny, “They may be slow paying, but they’re good people.” He lent a woman money to attend her mother’s funeral. When the police picked up the drunks responsible for cutting grass and collecting litter in the trailer park, Tobin bailed them out of jail.

  Tobin’s negotiations with tenants were rarely committed to writing, and sometimes tenants remembered things differently from the way Tobin did. A tenant would say she owed $150 and Tobin would say it was $250 or $600. 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.

  It took a certain skill to make a living off the city’s poorest trailer park, a certain kind of initiative. Tobin’s strategy was simple. He would walk right up to a drug addict or a metal scrapper or a disabled grandmother and say, “I want my money.” He would pound on the door until a tenant answered. It was almost impossible to hide the fact that you were home. It was hard to hide much of anything. Office Susie knew when your check arrived; she put it in your mailbox. And Lenny could plainly see if you had enough money to buy cigarettes or beer or a new bike for your kid but not enough to pay the rent. When a tenant opened the door, Tobin would thrust out his hand and say, “You got something for me?” Sometimes he knocked for several minutes. Sometimes he walked around the trailer, slapping the aluminum siding. Sometimes he asked Lenny or another tenant to rap on the back door while he assailed the front. He called tenants at work, even talking to their supervisors. When caseworkers or ministers would call and say “Please” or “Wait just a minute,” Tobin would reply, “Pay me the rent.”

  Tobin was not going to forgive and forget losing hundreds or thousands of dollars or settle for half of what he was owed or price a trailer below market value. When tenants fell behind, he had three options. He could let it slide and watch his income fall, he could begin eviction proceedings, or he could start a conversation.

  Option one was a non-option. Tobin was a landlord to make a living, and if he was too lenient he could lose his business. But 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.

  Jerry Warren wasn’t. Jerry used to ride with the Outlaws, a biker gang, and was covered in tattoos, several of which he had acquired in prison. Eviction notice in hand, Tobin had whapped the side of Jerry’s trailer, an aqua-blue 700-footer Jerry had painted himself. Jerry balled up the notice and threw it in Tobin’s face, yelling, “Tobin, I don’t give a shit about this fucking eviction! And Lenny, I don’t care how old you are. I’ll still take to whooping your ass something good!” Lenny and Jerry exchanged words, but Tobin was unfazed. He had begun a conversation, and a few days later, after he had cooled off, Jerry would pick it up.5 He offered to clean up the trailer park and attend to some maintenance concerns if Tobin canceled the eviction. Tobin accepted the offer.

  He took a different tack with Larraine Jenkins. A month before the Licenses Committee had rejected Tobin’s renewal application, he had given her a ride to eviction court in the Cadillac. Larraine received SSI for learning impairments attributed to a childhood fall out of an attic window. 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 st
reet people don’t have the right idea. Just live on the street. Don’t have to pay rent to nobody.” She sat in the passenger’s seat, while another tenant named Pam Reinke, a pregnant woman with straight-cut bangs and freckles, sat in the back. In court, Tobin offered them both stipulation agreements, a civil court’s version of a plea bargain. If they stuck to a tight payment schedule, Tobin would dismiss the eviction. If they deviated, Tobin could obtain a judgment of eviction and activate the sheriff’s eviction squad (with something called a “writ of restitution”) without having to take Larraine or Pam to court again.

  Throughout his fight with Witkowski, Tobin had worried that tenants would hold their money until the fate of the trailer park was settled. But most tenants went right on paying. Larraine wasn’t one of them. Already behind, she had withheld June’s rent because she didn’t know if the park would be shut down. If she had to move anyway, she figured, she might as well pocket the $550. Larraine was pushing her luck. Besides owing back rent, she had been one of the critics who had appeared on the nightly news, where she admitted to seeing prostitutes and drug dealers in the park. (Phyllis Gladstone, the most vocal supporter of Witkowski, had put Larraine up to it.)6 When Tobin found out about everything, he recalled that Larraine hadn’t fulfilled her stipulation agreement. That meant he could ask the sheriff’s eviction squad to remove her. So he did.

  Soon, a letter from the Milwaukee Sheriff’s Office arrived in Larraine’s mailbox. Printed on a bright-yellow sheet of paper was the following message:

  CURRENT OCCUPANT

  You are hereby notified that the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office has a court order (Writ of Restitution/Assistance) requiring your immediate removal from the premises. Failure to vacate immediately will be cause for the Sheriff to remove your belongings from the premises.

  If an eviction is necessary, risk of damages or loss of property shall be borne by you, the defendant, after delivery by the Sheriff to the place of safekeeping. Movers will not take food left in your refrigerator or freezer. REMOVE FOOD ITEMS.