Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  When Quentin pulled Sherrena over, she was a fourth-grade teacher. She talked like a teacher, calling strangers “honey” and offering motherly advice or chiding. “You know I’m fixing to fuss at you,” she would say. If she sensed your attention starting to drift, she would touch your elbow or thigh to pull you back in.

  Four years after meeting Quentin, Sherrena was happy with their relationship but bored at work. After eight years in the classroom, she quit and opened a day care. But “they shut it down on a tiny technicality,” she remembered. So she went back to teaching. After her son from an earlier relationship started acting out, she began homeschooling him and tried her hand at real estate. When people asked, “Why real estate?” Sherrena would reply with some talk about “long-term residuals” or “property being the best investment out there.” But there was more to it. Sherrena shared something with other landlords: an unbending confidence that she could make it on her own without a school or a company to fall back on, without a contract or a pension or a union. She had an understanding with the universe that she could strike out into nothing and through her own gumption and intelligence come back with a good living.

  Sherrena had bought a home in 1999, when prices were low. Riding the housing boom a few years later, she refinanced and pulled out $21,000 in equity. Six months later, she refinanced again, this time pulling $12,000. She used the cash to buy her first rental property: a two-unit duplex in the inner city, where housing was cheapest. Rental profits, refinancing, and private real-estate investors offering high-interest loans helped her buy more.

  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 Landlords operated in different neighborhoods, typically clustering their properties in a concentrated area. In the segregated city, this meant that landlords focused on housing certain kinds of people: white ones or black ones, poor families or college students.2 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 upstate. Sherrena had found her calling: inner-city entrepreneur.

  —

  Sherrena parked in front of Lamar’s place and reached for a pair of eviction notices. The property sat just off Wright Street, with empty lots and a couple of street memorials for murder victims: teddy bears, Black & Mild cigars, and scribbled notes lashed to tree trunks. It was a four-family property consisting of two detached two-story buildings, one directly behind the other. The houses were longer than they were wide, with rough-wood balconies painted blue-gray like the trim and vinyl siding that was the brownish-white of leftover milk in a cereal bowl. The house facing the street had two doors, for the upper and lower units, and a pair of wooden steps leading to each, one old with peeling paint, the other new and unvarnished.

  Lamar lived in the lower unit of the back house, which abutted the alley. When Sherrena pulled up, he was outside, being pushed in a wheelchair by Patrice, whose name was on the other eviction notice. He had snapped on his plastic prosthetic legs. An older black man, Lamar was wiry and youthful from the waist up, with skin the color of wet sand. He had a shaved head and a thin mustache, flecked with gray. He wore a yellow sports jersey with his keys around his neck.

  “Oh, I got two at the same time,” Sherrena tried to say lightly. She handed Lamar and Patrice their eviction notices.

  “You almost been late,” Patrice said. She wore a headwrap, pajama pants, and a white tank top that showed off her tattoo on her right arm: a cross and a ribbon with the names of her three children. At twenty-four, Patrice was half Lamar’s age, but her eyes looked older. She and her children lived in the upper unit of the front house. Her mother, Doreen Hinkston, and her three younger siblings lived below her, in the bottom-floor unit. Patrice creased her eviction notice and jammed it into a pocket.

  “I’m fixin’ to go to practice,” Lamar said from his seat.

  “What practice?” Sherrena asked.

  “My kids’ football practice.” He looked at the paper in his hand. “You know, we fixin’ to do the basement. I’m already started.”

  “He didn’t tell me about that,” Sherrena replied, “he” being Quentin. Sometimes tenants worked off the rent by doing odd jobs for landlords, like cleaning out basements. “You better call me. Don’t forget who the boss is,” Sherrena joked. Lamar smiled back at her.

  As Patrice began pushing Lamar down the street, Sherrena went over a checklist in her head. There were so many things to deal with—repairs, collections, moves, advertisements, inspectors, social workers, cops. The swirl of work, a million little things regularly interrupted by some big thing, had been encroaching on her Sunday soul food dinners with her mom. Just a month earlier, someone had been shot in one of her properties. A tenant’s new boyfriend had taken three pumps to the chest, and blood had run down him like a full-on faucet. After police officers had asked their questions and balled up the yellow tape, Sherrena and Quentin were stuck with the cleanup. Quentin set on it with a couple guys, rubber gloves, and a Shop-Vac. “Here you come with a boyfriend that I don’t know anything about?” Sherrena asked the tenant. Quentin dealt with messes; Sherrena dealt with people. That was the arrangement.

  Then, a few days after the shooting, another tenant phoned Sherrena to say that her house was being shut down. Sherrena didn’t believe it until she pulled up and spotted white men in hard hats screwing green boards over her windows. The tenants had been caught stealing electricity, so the We Energies men had disconnected service at the pole and placed a call to the Department of Neighborhood Services (DNS). The tenants had to be out that day.3

  In Milwaukee and across the nation, most renters were responsible for keeping the lights and heat on, but that had become increasingly difficult to do. Since 2000, the cost of fuels and utilities had risen by more than 50 percent, thanks to increasing global demand and the expiration of price caps. 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.5 Stealing gas was much more difficult and rare. It was also unnecessary in the wintertime, when the city put a moratorium on disconnections. On that April day when the moratorium lifted, gas operators returned to poor neighborhoods with their stacks of disconnection notices and toolboxes. We Energies disconnected roughly 50,000 households each year for nonpayment. 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.6

  Sherrena watched the DNS hard hats march around her property. There were few things that frustrated landlords more than clipboard-in-hand building inspectors. When they were not shutting down a property, they were scrutinizing apartments for code violations. Upon request, DNS would send a building inspector to any property. The service was designed to protect the city’s most vulnerable renters from negligent landlords, but to Sherrena a
nd other property owners, tenants called for small, cosmetic things—and often because they were trying to stop an eviction or retaliate against landlords. Sherrena thought about the money she had just lost: a few thousand dollars for electrical work and unpaid rent. 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.

  —

  Sherrena drove off Wright Street and headed north. Since she was in this part of town, she decided to make one more stop: her duplex on Thirteenth and Keefe. Sherrena had let a new tenant move in the previous month with a partial rent and security deposit payment.

  The tenant was sitting on her stoop in a long-sleeved flannel shirt, hushing a colicky baby and talking with her mother, who was leaning against a car. Seeing Sherrena, the young woman wasted no time. “My son is sick because my house is cold,” she said. Her voice was tired. “The window have a hole in it, and I’ve been waiting patiently. I mean, I’m ready to move.”

  Sherrena tilted her head, confused. The window had a hole, not a crater, and it was warm enough outside that children were still swimming in Lake Michigan. How could the house be cold?

  “I done called the city,” the mother added, peeling herself off the car. She was slender and tall, her hair frizzed by the late-summer humidity.

  Sherrena took a breath. There were worse houses on the block, but Sherrena knew her place on Thirteenth Street wasn’t up to code. She would say almost no house in the city was, a commentary on the mismatch between Milwaukee’s worn-out housing stock and its exacting building code. Thanks to the tenant’s mother, an inspector would arrive in a few days. He would jiggle the stair banister, photograph the hole in the window, shimmy the unhinged front door. Every code violation would cost Sherrena money.

  “That wasn’t right for you to do that,” Sherrena said, “because I was working with her.”

  “Then fix the window,” the mother replied.

  “We will! But if she don’t call us to let us know—”

  “She don’t have no phone, that’s why I called!” the mother interrupted.

  As the conversation grew louder, a crowd gathered. “Who’s she?” a young boy asked. “Landlord,” came a reply.

  “I didn’t know you were going to call the building inspector, Momma,” the tenant said, nervously.

  “It’s too late now. The damage is done,” Sherrena said. She shook her head and, hands on her hips, looked at the young woman with the baby. “It’s always the ones that I try to help that I have the problems out of. And I’m not saying that you a problem, but it’s just that, somebody else is involved, and you the one living here. So it puts you in a spot.”

  “Well, let me ask you something.” The tenant’s mother stepped closer and the crowd with her. “If this was your daughter and these were your grandkids, what would you do?”

  Sherrena didn’t step back. She looked up at the mother, noticing her gold front tooth, and answered, “I would have definitely made a connection with the landlord and not called the city.”

  Sherrena pushed past the crowd and stepped briskly to her car. When she got home, she opened the door and yelled, “Quentin, we done walked straight into some bullshit!”

  Sherrena sat down in her paper-cluttered home office. The office was one of five bedrooms in Sherrena and Quentin’s home, which sat in a quiet middle-class black neighborhood off Capitol Drive. The house had a finished basement with an inset Jacuzzi tub. Sherrena and Quentin had furnished it with beige leather furniture, large brass and crystal light fixtures, and gold-colored curtains. The kitchen was spacious and unused, since they ate out most days. Typically the only things in the refrigerator were restaurant doggie bags.

  “Huh?” Quentin called back, coming down the stairs.

  “The girl downstairs at Thirteenth Street? Her momma done called the building inspector….Her mother was outside talking shit!”

  Quentin listened to the story and said, “Put her out.”

  Sherrena thought about it for a moment, then agreed. She reached in a drawer and began filling out a five-day eviction notice. The law forbade landlords from retaliating against tenants who contacted DNS. But landlords could at any time evict tenants for being behind on rent or for other violations.

  By the time Quentin and Sherrena pulled the Suburban onto Thirteenth Street, night had fallen. The apartment door was open. Sherrena walked right through it without knocking and handed the young tenant an eviction notice, saying, “Here. I hope you get some assistance.”

  A man followed Sherrena out the door and stood on the unlit porch. “Excuse me,” he called out as Sherrena met Quentin in the street. “You’re evicting her?”

  “She told me she wanted to move, so that let me know she wasn’t going to pay anything else,” Sherrena answered.

  “She told you she wanted the windows fixed.”

  Quentin interjected, looking at Sherrena, “He ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.”

  “I got everything to do with it, blood. This my stepdaughter here!”

  “You don’t even stay here though, man!” Quentin yelled back.

  “Ain’t nobody want to live like that….Fuck you mean, I don’t have nothing to do with it?”

  Quentin opened the Suburban’s door and pulled out his security belt, equipped with handcuffs, a small baton, and a canister of Mace the size of a small fire extinguisher. Quentin had been here before. There was the tenant who told him he was going to take his security deposit out of Quentin’s pocket. There was the one who said he was going to shoot him in the face.

  The tenant’s mother joined the stepfather on the dark porch. “Are you evicting her?” she asked.

  “She didn’t pay her rent,” Sherrena said. “Do y’all have her rent to pay?”

  “I don’t give a shit, man,” the stepfather was saying almost to himself. What he didn’t give a shit about wasn’t the eviction but whatever was going to transpire there, at that very moment, on that dark street.

  “I don’t either!” Quentin shot back.

  “I’ll whip that motherfuckin’ ass, nigga….Don’t say I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.”

  “You don’t!” Sherrena yelled as Quentin tugged her back to the Suburban. “You don’t!”

  Days after the tenant left, Sherrena took a call from a caseworker at Wraparound, a local social services agency. The caseworker had a client who needed a place to live with her two boys. Wraparound would pay her security deposit and first month’s rent, which sounded good to Sherrena. The new tenant’s name was Arleen Belle.

  2.

  MAKING RENT

  Sometime after Sherrena paid him a visit with her eviction notice, Lamar was back in his apartment on Eighteenth and Wright, playing spades with his two sons and their friends. As always, they sat around a small kitchen table, slapping the playing cards hard on the wood or sending them spinning with a calm flick of the wrist. The neighborhood boys knew they could show up at Lamar’s place day or night for a bite to eat, a drag off a blunt if they were lucky, and a romping game of spades.

  “You ain’t got no more spades, Negro?”

  “Look, we gonna set they ass.”

  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. Eddy, Lamar’s younger son at fifteen, worked the stereo while four other neighborhood boys stood around, waiting their turn at spades. Lamar sat in his wheelchair. His prosthetic legs, each one foot to top-shin, stood beside his bed, casting a humanlike shadow on the rough wood floor.

  “Police crazy,” Buck offered, inspecting his hand. He was finishing high school and working part-time in its cafeteria, where he had to wear a hairnet to cover his thick
cornrows. Buck slept at his parents’ house but lived at Lamar’s. If someone asked him why, he would study his size twelve boots and just say, “ ’Cause.” The boys usually walked to the store or football practice together, strutting nine- or ten-deep down Wright Street. Being stopped by the Milwaukee PD had become routine. This was why, when someone made a run to the weed spot, he usually went alone. “Next time, I’m a be like, ‘What you stoppin’ me for?’ ” Buck went on. “ ’Cause you have a right to ask ’em….They gotta see, smell, hear, or something.”

  “They ain’t gotta see nothing,” Lamar replied.

  “Yes they do, Pops! They teachin’ me this at schooool.”

  “They teaching you wrong, then.”

  DeMarcus laughed and put a cigarette lighter to a blunt he had just licked shut. He drew in and passed it. The game got under way—quick at first, then slower as players’ hands thinned. “When the police come up,” Buck persisted, “even if they pull you over, you ain’t even gotta let your window down. You just gotta roll it down a little bit.”

  “It ain’t that sweet.” Lamar grinned.

  “Na, Pops!”

  “Don’t be trying to change things, man,” cut in DeMarcus, who had just been arrested—because of his “slick mouth,” according to Lamar. “A hard head makes a soft ass.”