Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  Scott saw that he needed a plan. So he rang up Pito, an old Narcotics Anonymous buddy, and asked if he had any work. Pito connected Scott with Mira, a take-no-shit lesbian from Puerto Rico, who offered him a job cleaning out foreclosed homes. Mira paid Scott and the other crewmen in cash. The amounts varied widely; Scott didn’t understand or ask why. They gave scrappers the metal and sold some valuables here and there, hauling the rest to the dump.

  Scott was stunned by what people left behind. Sofas, computers, stainless-steel ranges. Children’s clothes with the tags on them, tricycles, holiday decorations in basement bins, frozen pork chops, cans of green beans. Sheeted mattresses, file cabinets, framed posters and prayers and inspirational verses, curtains, blouses on hangers, lawn mowers, pictures. Sometimes the houses were humble and squat with cracked windows and grease on the ceiling. Sometimes they were cavernous, with thick carpet, master bathrooms, and back decks. To Scott, it felt like the whole city was being tossed out.

  “Sometimes you walk into a house, and it’s like, they just walk out with the clothes on their back,” Scott was saying over another breakfast beer with Teddy. It had been roughly a week since they had received their eviction notice. “There’s some profundity in it that I don’t understand yet.”

  “I wish I could work,” Teddy answered. “I wish I could be outside and work. But the shape that I’m in.”

  Scott wasn’t interested in the work but the wreckage. “I can’t figure out what happened to the people,” he continued. “It’s really—” He let the word float.

  “Scott,” Teddy said, slowly turning toward him. “You’re just like my family. I hate to leave you, but I’m headed back home.”

  “I don’t even like you,” Scott responded with a grin.

  “I know that’s just a lie. I know you don’t want to see me go. But I know you know it’s got to be done.”

  Around sunrise Saturday morning, a white van pulled up to the trailer. Scott placed a bag of Teddy’s clothes and his fishing gear in the back and helped his old friend into the passenger seat. Teddy’s bendless arm raised in a quiet goodbye, as if by string, as the van pulled away under a Harley-Davidson–orange sky.

  The following evening around dusk, while Scott was out with Mira’s crew, people started raiding his trailer. Teddy was gone, and everyone in the trailer park knew that Scott would soon be too. They started small, taking shirts, movies, jackets, a backpack. Then they went for the larger items, carrying out the table, the couch, the crucifixion painting.

  Larraine’s brother-in-law, Lane, a skinny man with dark hair and a gold necklace, watched from his daisy-yellow trailer. “Buzzards,” he said, shaking his head. “You’d better close your mouth when you sleep, or these people will steal the gold right out of your teeth.”

  When Scott got home that night and realized what had happened, he rushed to check if the plastic container in his room—the one stuffed with photographs, diplomas, and memories, hard evidence that he had once been someone else—was still there. It was. They had taken the bed but left the box. It felt like a gift. Scott then walked slowly from room to room, noticing what had been snatched and what was unwanted even by the desperate. No one took the books or the Polaroid camera, but they had collected the empty beer cans to recycle. Scott fingered the remainders like he sometimes did in the foreclosed homes, studying them as if they were dug-up artifacts or fossils.

  He thought of the last home he had cleaned out that night. From the outside, it looked like any other house. But inside, he had found a stripper’s pole attached to a homemade stage encircled by couches. Hard-core pornography was strewn about everywhere. There were three bedrooms upstairs. Two were covered in more smut. Scott opened the door to the third and stared down at a twin bed, toys, and half-finished homework. Most abandoned homes left him few clues about the people who had lived there. As he went about his work, Scott would fill in the rest, imagining laughter around the dinner table, sleeping faces in the morning, a man shaving in the bathroom. This last house told its own story. Thinking of that one bedroom, Scott sat down on his empty floor, in his gutted-out trailer, and wept.

  8.

  CHRISTMAS IN ROOM 400

  Sherrena decided to evict Arleen. The funeral and subsequent welfare sanction had put Arleen too far behind: $870. Sherrena felt it was time to “let go and move on to the next tenant.” Earlier in the month, she had filed the paperwork and received a court date of 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.1 A new tenant had already asked Sherrena if a portion of her rent money could be returned so she could buy gifts. Sherrena told her, “You gotta have a house to put the Christmas tree and presents in….You’ve been knowing Christmas was coming eleven months ago.”

  The night before Sherrena and Arleen’s date in eviction court, snow began to fall. When Milwaukeeans woke up the following morning, they found their city buried in it. People in parkas and knit hats shuffled the sidewalks. Mothers with bundled-up children huddled under bus-stop awnings, shifting their weight from one leg to the other. The city’s smokestacks billowed cotton-thick clouds of steam into a pale sky. Holiday decorations dotted the North Side: a black Nativity, a snowman smiling from an abandoned lot.

  Sherrena pulled up to the Milwaukee County Courthouse. The courthouse had been built in 1931 but made to look like it had always been there. Corinthian columns, taller and thicker than oak trunks, encircled the building, lifting its roof high above downtown. The building was enormous, with an imposing limestone façade on which the architects had etched in block letters: VOX POPULI VOX DEI. The voice of the people is the voice of God.

  Sherrena wondered if Arleen would show. Most of the time, tenants didn’t, and Sherrena preferred it that way. She had learned that it didn’t matter how much kindness you had shown a tenant up to that point. “All that stuff goes out the window” in court. Sherrena had brought Arleen milk and groceries. She’d even had a worker deliver a stove that was sitting unused in one of her vacant units. But she knew that, once in front of the commissioner, Arleen was more likely to bring up the time the water heater went out or mention the hole in the window Quentin still hadn’t fixed. Still, 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. Sherrena had had a couple cases thrown out on account of paperwork errors. When that happened, she had to start the eviction process all over again, which usually meant losing another month’s rent on that unit. When things went her way, however, she could have the eviction squad physically remove tenants within ten days.

  Once she was through security, Sherrena made her way to Room 400, Milwaukee County Small Claims Court, the busiest courtroom in the state.2 Her footsteps clacked on the marble floors and echoed off the vaulted ceilings. She passed lawyers in trench coats, staring at the floor and talking on their cell phones, and young parents with children, gaping like tourists. The courtroom was full. Women and men were squeezed into long wooden pews and stood lining the walls, their bodies warming the chamber. Sherrena looked for a seat, waving at landlords she recognized.

  At the back of the courtroom, landlords were talking tenants into stipulation agreements, offering to dismiss evictions if tenants caught up on the rent. One, a white man in a leather jacket who had been in the local paper a few months back for racking up hundreds of property violations, was joking with his young female assistant when a tenant approached. The tenant was a black woman, likely in her fifties. Her shoulders were uplifted under her worn overcoat. She reached into her purse and handed the landlord $700 in cash.

  “I’m hoping—” she began.

  The landlord cut her off. “Don’t hope. Write the check.” />
  “I can get you another six hundred in two weeks.”

  The landlord asked her to sign a stipulation, which included a $55 late fee. She reached for his pen.3

  Toward the front of the room, in a reserved space with tables and plenty of empty chairs, sat lawyers in pinstripe suits and power ties. They had been hired by landlords. Some sat with manila folders stacked in front of them, reading the paper or filling in the crossword. Others joked with the bailiff, who periodically broke conversation to tell a tenant to remove his hat or lower her voice. Everyone in the reserved space, the lawyers and bailiff, was white.

  In front of the lawyers, a large wooden desk faced the crowd. Two women sat on either side of the desk, calling out the day’s cases and taking attendance. Most of the names flung into the air went unclaimed. 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.4 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.5 When tenants did not show up and their landlord or a representative did, the caller applied three quick stamps to the file—indicating that the tenant had received a default eviction judgment—and placed it on top of a growing pile. The sound of eviction court was a soft hum of dozens of people sighing, coughing, murmuring, and whispering to children interspersed with the cadence of a name, a pause, and three loud thumps of the stamp.

  Behind the front desk, framed between two grand wooden columns, hung a large painting of Moses descending Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments unbroken. He glared down at the Israelites in the desert, dancing around the golden calf. Doorways on either side of the callers’ desk led to commissioners’ offices, where the actual hearings took place. When their case was called, landlords and tenants walked through a side doorway, usually to emerge just a few minutes later.

  A black woman whose hearing had just concluded stepped back into the room, holding her child’s hand. Her head was wrapped, and she had kept on her heavy blue winter coat. She continued down the middle aisle of Room 400, walking by an anemic white man with homemade tattoos, a white woman in a wheelchair wearing pajama pants and Crocs, a blind black man with a limp hat on his lap, a Hispanic man wearing work boots and a shirt that read PRAY FOR US—all waiting for their eviction cases. Tenants in eviction court were generally poor, and almost all of them (92 percent) had missed rent payments. The majority spent at least half their household income on rent. One-third devoted at least 80 percent to it.6 Of the tenants who did come to court and were evicted, only 1 in 6 had another place lined up: shelters or the apartments of friends or family. A few resigned themselves to the streets. Most simply did not know where they would go.7

  The woman in the blue winter coat found the face of another black woman, sitting at the end of a pew. As she passed, she bent down and whispered, “Don’t worry. It only takes a minute, honey.” As usual, the courtroom was full of black women. 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.8 Children of all ages encircled these women. A girl with a full box of barrettes in her hair sat quietly, swinging her legs under the pew. A dark-skinned boy in a collared shirt two sizes too big sat up straight and wore a hard face. His sister next to him tried to sleep, folding one arm over her eyes and clutching a stuffed dog in the other.

  In Milwaukee’s poorest black neighborhoods, eviction had become commonplace—especially for women. In those neighborhoods, 1 female renter in 17 was evicted through the court system each year, which was twice as often as men from those neighborhoods and nine times as often as women from the city’s poorest white areas. Women from black neighborhoods made up 9 percent of Milwaukee’s population and 30 percent of its evicted tenants.9

  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.10

  A commissioner appeared from a side doorway and took a file from a caller. Sherrena tapped her foot, waiting her turn. At the beginning of the month, she had been in court for eight eviction cases, including Patrice’s. Only one tenant made it: Ricky One Leg. He limped up to Sherrena in the hallway and complained, “Why you drag me down here?” Ricky had a high-pitched, sandpaper voice, beer on his breath, and a wooden leg he’d received after being shot four times on his twenty-second birthday.

  “What? You want me to punch you in your other leg?” Sherrena shot back. She raised her fists, and Ricky pretended to stab her foot with his cane.

  After they finished laughing, Sherrena said, “I love you, Ricky.”

  “I love you too, baby.”

  “You know, this is just a formality. You know, you can’t go to the grocery store and say, ‘Well, I’m gonna take that food, and I ain’t paying you shit.’ ”

  “I know, baby. If I had a business, I would feel the same way….My daddy always told me you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

  When it was time, Sherrena and Ricky approached the front bench. Since cases were grouped by plaintiffs (landlords), a caller made sure Sherrena’s other tenants weren’t there.

  “Sissell Clement?” Stamp, stamp, stamp.

  “Patrice Hinkston?” Stamp, stamp, stamp.

  Patrice had gone to work at Cousins Subs instead of going to court. She couldn’t find anyone who would swap hours, and she didn’t want to lose this job. Her manager had looked past her Class A misdemeanor (writing bad checks). The only thing she liked about working at Cousins was her commute: a peaceful hour-long bus ride through streets lined with brick houses and mounted American flags.

  “Eff her, and eff the court,” Patrice later said. “My mom has been like through an eviction before, and the judge that she had was rude.” Patrice would begin her rental career with an eviction record. She didn’t give that much thought. “Everybody I know, except for my white friends, I swear they got an eviction on their record.” Patrice knew that if she did come to court she not only would lose work hours and frustrate her manager but also would have to defend herself against someone who was more educated, more familiar with the law, and more comfortable in court. Other tenants had it worse, having to go toe to toe with their landlords’ lawyer.

  Plus, Patrice would have to set foot in that grand old courthouse. The nicest building in Patrice’s life was Lena’s Food Market off Fond Du Lac Avenue. It had shopping carts, bright fluorescent lights, and a buffed linoleum floor. Her white friends called it the ghetto grocery store, but it was one of the better markets on the North Side. And at Lena’s, Patrice never felt her existence questioned. She tried not to go to parts of the city where she did. Patrice lived four miles away from the shore of Lake Michigan: an hour on foot, a half hour by bus, fifteen minutes by car. She had never been.

  —

  “Sherrena,” someone whispered. Sherrena turned around and saw that Arleen had poked her head into Room 400.

  Sherrena stepped into the hallway and walked up to Arleen, who was tucking her face underneath a red hoodie. “Girl,” Sherrena said, “I got to get you up outta this house or get my money. Genuine….I mean, ’cause I got bills. I got a bill to show you right now that’s gonna take your eyes outta your head.”

  Sherrena reached in her files and handed Arleen a tax bill for a property the city had condemned. It listed delinquent storm water and sewer charges, fees for the board-up, and additional charges that totaled $11,465.67. Arleen stared blankly at the bill. It was more than her annual income.

  Sherrena cocked her head and asked, “Do you see what I have to go through?…It might not’ve been your fault about what happened, but”—she pinched the bill between pointer and thumb and gave it a wiggle—“I got issues.”

  Sherrena reclaimed her seat in Room 400. She remembered her
first eviction. Nervous and confused, she had gone over the paperwork a dozen times. Everything went her way. Soon after, she filed another eviction, then another. When filling out the court papers, Sherrena learned to put “et al.” after a tenant’s name so that the eviction judgment covered everyone in the house, even people she didn’t know about. She learned that the correct answer on the documents asking her to estimate damages was “not over $5,000,” the maximum amount allowed; learned that commissioners frowned on late fees in excess of $55; learned that dragging slow-paying tenants to court was usually worth the $89.50 processing fee because it spurred many to find a way to catch up. Plus she could add the processing fee to their bill.

  This wasn’t Arleen’s first eviction either. That had happened sixteen years earlier, when she was twenty-two. Arleen figured she had rented twenty houses since turning eighteen, which meant she and her children had moved about once a year—multiple times because they were evicted. But 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. Arleen remembered when they used to take a break from doing evictions around Christmastime in Milwaukee. But they did away with that in 1991, after a landlord convinced the American Civil Liberties Union to argue that the practice was an unfair religious celebration.11 Some old-timers still observed the moratorium out of kindness or habit or ignorance. Sherrena was not one of them.

  More time passed. The lawyers had gone home—their cases were called first—leaving only the bailiff and the callers up front. With no one to talk to, the bailiff, a white woman with a compact frame and overbite, began passing the time by snipping at tenants. “Silence your cell phone or it will be confiscated!” Both callers had stopped covering their yawns an hour ago. “You have to clear the doorway!” the bailiff announced. Children’s shoes tapped the pews. “If you’re going to talk, discuss your case outside.”