Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  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.

  —

  “Press 1 to leave a voice message.” Sherrena pressed 1. “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.”

  Arleen didn’t regret what she had done. Usually when there was a funeral, she couldn’t even afford to buy Jafaris new shoes and would just scrub his best ones. She had missed funerals in the past because Jori and Jafaris didn’t have anything to wear. But this was her sister—not in the biological sense but in the spiritual sense. They were close. She had long been a sickly girl, overweight and diabetic; her heart quit after she’d been hospitalized for pneumonia and a series of other health complications.

  Arleen didn’t have the money, but neither did anyone else. She would have been ashamed of herself if she hadn’t pitched in. She gave half of her check to Sherrena and the other half to New Pitts Mortuary.

  Sherrena felt bad when she heard about Arleen’s sister. She made her new tenant a deal. Arleen could stay if she paid $650 for three months to recover the lost rent. 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.

  Sherrena and Quentin were in the Suburban when Arleen called around the beginning of the next month. Sherrena hung up and looked at Quentin. “Arleen said her check didn’t come.”

  This was a half-truth. Arleen had received a check, but not for $628. She had missed an appointment with her welfare caseworker, completely forgetting about it. A reminder notice was mailed to Atkinson, or was it Nineteenth Street? When Arleen didn’t show, the caseworker “sanctioned” Arleen by decreasing her benefit.8 Arleen could have given Sherrena her reduced check, but she thought it was better to be behind and have a few hundred dollars in her pocket than be behind and completely broke.

  Quentin kept his eyes on the road. “Story of they life,” he said.

  6.

  RAT HOLE

  Three generations of Hinkstons lived in the brownish-white house on Eighteenth and Wright, the one in front of Lamar’s. 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. Doreen had four children—Patrice, Natasha, C.J., and Ruby, ages twenty-four, nineteen, fourteen, and thirteen—and three grandchildren from Patrice: ten-year-old Mikey and his two younger sisters: Jada, four; and Kayla Mae, two. There was also a dog, Coco, a football-sized ankle-biter loyal only to Natasha.

  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. Patrice, Natasha, and C.J. responded by spending as much time as they could out of the house, walking the block in good weather or passing evenings in the back apartment, playing spades with Lamar. But at night, everyone packed in. Patrice claimed the smaller of the two bedrooms. If she was going to pay half the rent, she argued, then she should get one bedroom to herself, even if it didn’t have a door. In the other bedroom, Doreen and Natasha shared the bed while Ruby curled up in a chair at night. Mikey bedded down with C.J. on a sheetless single mattress in the living room, next to the glass table and head-high piles of clean and dirty clothes that didn’t fit in the bedrooms. Patrice’s daughters slept in the dining room on a single mattress, its corners split open, exposing innards of springs and etiolated foam.

  No one slept well. Natasha had a habit of kicking Doreen in her sleep, and Doreen had a habit of rolling over on Natasha or stealing Natasha’s pillow and hitting her with it when she tried to tug it back. The older children often missed the early-morning school bus. The little ones fell asleep at random times throughout the day. Doreen would come out of the kitchen to find their tiny heads resting on the table or some piece of clothing on the floor.

  The worst night’s sleep always came on the eve of your birthday. If you fell asleep that night, you could be sure that Patrice would sneak into your room and smear mayonnaise or ketchup on your face. For the past six years, the Hinkstons hadn’t been able to celebrate Christmas—they didn’t have the money. But on your birthday, you woke up smiling with goo on your face and a cake on the table. The Hinkstons loved pranking one another. Once Natasha put pepper in Patrice’s underwear. Patrice retaliated by sneaking Ruby out of the house on a day Natasha was put in charge of watching her younger sister. When Natasha noticed Ruby was gone, she spent the next several hours patrolling the neighborhood, frantically searching.

  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.

  After Patrice had moved downstairs, Sherrena discovered that she had been pirating electricity. The meter-repair bill would cost $200, and Sherrena refused to pay it while Patrice was living with Doreen. “I ain’t incurring shit,” she said. “They black asses are gonna incur everything, or they gonna be cold this winter.” It took the Hinkstons a couple months to save $200; during that time the back of the house, including the kitchen, was without power. Everything in the refrigerator spoiled. The family ate dinners out of cans: ravioli, SpaghettiOs.

  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. The roaches were there when the Hinkstons moved in: crawling the sinks, the toilet, the walls, filling kitchen drawers. “They were rushers,” Sherrena said about Doreen’s family. “They moved in on top of roaches.”

  —

  Before the Hinkstons had moved into Sherrena’s apartment off Wright Street, they’d lived for seven years in a five-bedroom house on Thirty-Second Street. It wasn’t perfect, but it was spacious and the landlord was decent. They pooled their money to make rent: $800 a month. Patrice was serving up lunch at a fast-food joint, and after dropping out, Natasha had started working too. Doreen hadn’t completed high school either, though she had learned to type seventy-two words a minute at Job Corps years back. Patrice almost finished high school, making it to the eleventh grade even after having Mikey at fourteen, but in the end she started working full-time to help the family stay afloat. At sixteen, Natasha began logging twelve-hour shifts at Quad Graphics for $9.50 an hour, sometimes falling asleep on the printing machines. They didn’t ask her age, and she didn’t offer it. Doreen’s monthly income was $1,124: $437 from a state-funded child support supplement and $687 from SSI, which she received for an old leg injury. In eighth grade, she had broken her hip on Easter Sunday—her new wedge high heels did her in—and the fracture had never quite healed. Maybe it would have if her father had rushed her to the hospital instead of keeping her home for several days. The old man hated doctors. When his knees began going out, he just sawed off a kitchen table leg and used it for a cane.

  On
Thirty-Second Street, the Hinkstons became a neighborhood feature. The children ran in and out of neighbors’ homes, and from her front steps Doreen got to know the other families on her block. She would rock and laugh with the grandmothers and yell at the neighborhood boys when they terrorized stray cats. When summer arrived, the children would buy bottle rockets from a neighbor and shoot them off in the street. Every so often, Doreen would host a party and invite everyone.

  Then one August day in 2005, Doreen turned on the television and saw New Orleans underwater. A muddy expanse filled the city, and black bodies bobbed past folks on rooftops. She immediately called her best friend, Fanny, asking her to come over. Doreen and Fanny were shocked by what they saw on the news. “This is a total disgrace,” Doreen remembered thinking. After a few restless nights, Doreen felt called to do something more for the flood victims than fret and pray. She left Patrice in charge and boarded a southbound bus with Fanny. She was forty-one. Patrice was twenty.

  It wasn’t like her to do something like this. She was a soft-humming stoop-sitter. “I don’t go no further than my front porch,” Doreen said. But there were moments along the way when she struck out against life’s current, like the January night in 1998 when she hurriedly packed up and moved the family to Illinois without telling anyone. She needed to get away from C.J. and Ruby’s father, who would go on to serve a long sentence upstate.

  After two days on the bus, Doreen and Fanny found themselves in Lafayette, Louisiana. They joined dozens of other volunteers, passing out blankets and serving food.

  The trip caused the Hinkstons to fall a month behind in rent. But they had been long-term tenants and their landlord was loyal. “He wasn’t sweating me,” Doreen recalled. The landlord told her to pay him back when she could. Doreen gave him extra when she had it, $100 here and there. She worked to clear her debt, but then something would happen and she’d come up short. Months passed; then years.

  One early spring night in 2008 two neighborhood boys on Thirty-Second Street shot at each other. Bullets zipped through the Hinkstons’ front door, shattering its window. Natasha, who was seventeen at the time, was sweeping up the glass when the police arrived. They asked to take a look inside. To hear the Hinkstons tell it, the officers ransacked their house, looking for guns or drugs. (Patrice speculated that a neighbor associated with one of the shooters had pinned the crime on the three young men who were staying with the Hinkstons at the time: Patrice’s and Natasha’s boyfriends as well as a cousin.) All the police found was a mess: dishes piled high in the sink, overflowing trash cans, flies. The Hinkstons were not the tidiest family, and to make matters worse, they had thrown a party the night before. There were less superficial problems too, like the plywood board the landlord had haphazardly nailed over a sagging bathroom ceiling. Perhaps because of the mess, or because Patrice began snapping at the officers around two a.m., or because they believed the Hinkstons had played a role in the shooting—whatever the case, 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. Doreen had only managed to get halfway caught up when the shooting happened. There had never been a need to rush.

  After the court commissioner stamped their eviction judgment, the Hinkstons needed to find another place quickly. They searched on their own—but without a car or the Internet their reach was limited. They sought help from social workers, and one put them in touch with Sherrena. She showed them the apartment off Wright Street, and they hated it. “I wouldn’t advertise it to a blind person,” Patrice said. But anyplace, the family figured, was better than the street or a shelter; so they took it. Sherrena handed Doreen the keys on the spot, along with a rent receipt dashed off on a scrap of paper. Doreen tucked the scrap with PAID $1,100, RENT + SECURITY DEPOSIT into her Bible.

  —

  Poor families were often compelled to accept substandard housing in the harried aftermath of eviction. Milwaukee renters whose previous move was involuntary were almost 25 percent more likely to experience long-term housing problems than other low-income renters.1 Doreen said she took Sherrena’s apartment because her family was desperate. “But we not gonna be here long.” 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 Hinkstons began looking for new housing soon after moving into Sherrena’s place, calling the numbers on rent signs and leafing through apartment listings in the RedBook, a free glossy found at most inner-city corner stores. But their previous move had left them exhausted, and Doreen’s fresh eviction record wasn’t helping matters. Patrice soon moved into the second-floor unit upstairs, and everyone breathed easier for a time. Fall arrived, and the Hinkstons settled into the neighborhood but always considered their stay temporary, even as the months rolled by, one after the other. It wasn’t like on Thirty-Second, where Doreen had made it a point to get to know her neighbors and watch over the neighborhood boys. At the time of Patrice’s eviction, six months after the family had relocated to Eighteenth and Wright, the only neighbor Doreen knew by name was Lamar—and his name was all she really knew about him. “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.

  “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. Jacobs believed that a prerequisite for this type of healthy and engaged community was the presence of people who simply were present, who looked after the neighborhood. She has been proved right: disadvantaged neighborhoods with higher levels of “collective efficacy”—the stuff of loosely linked neighbors who trust one another and share expectations about how to make their community better—have lower crime rates.3

  A single eviction could destabilize multiple city blocks, not only the block from which a family was evicted but also the block to which it begrudgingly relocated. In this way, 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.”4 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.

  —

  Ruby, C.J., and Mikey had kept on their school uniforms—oversized white T-shirts and black jeans—while they took turns at the front window, watching for the lunch truck. Three times a week, a local church delivered sack lunches to the neighborhood. This day, Ruby was the one to spot it. “Lunch truck!” she yelled, bounding outside with the others. The kids returned with a bag for everyone. They passed them out without peeking inside because that would ruin the game. Green apples were swapped for red ones, Fritos for SunChips, apple juice for fruit punch.

  “I’ll give you two juices,” Natasha offered Ruby.

  “For an Oreo cake?” Ruby asked. After thinking it over, she shook her head no.

  “Ruby, you suck!”

  Ruby flashed a white smile and started bouncing from leg to leg. Her Ritalin was wearing off. Some nights after its effects had dissipated completely, she and Mikey would land backflips off the mattress in the living room.

  Natasha pouted. At nineteen, she was six years older than Ruby but acted more like the oldest child than the youngest adult. While Patrice had only just begun a
dolescence when she found herself a mother, Natasha balked at the thought of having kids. “They messy. They dirty!” she said. “And you don’t know if they gonna be ugly or pretty—so hell no….I’m living free and independent!” Natasha partied with the boys at Lamar’s house and in the summertime sauntered around the neighborhood barefoot. She was light-skinned like Patrice—“redboned”—even though they had different fathers. Men in cars would slow down and crane their necks. Sometimes old ladies would slow down too and offer Natasha shoes with pity-filled eyes. That always made Patrice chuckle.

  After reading aloud the prayers the church ladies had slipped inside the white sacks, the Hinkstons settled into their sack dinner and began a conversation about words they had a hard time pronouncing. “Royal.” “Turquoise.” Anything was a welcome distraction from the stench and state of the house. In the kitchen and bathroom, things had gotten so bad that Doreen was considering calling Sherrena and Quentin. She loathed calling them. The Hinkston family was slow to admit it, but their landlords intimidated them. “Quentin is a grouch,” Patrice often complained. When Quentin was in the apartment, he made comments about how bad it smelled. If he brought workers over to fix a problem, he often left behind discarded materials, which Doreen and Patrice took as a sign of disrespect. “It’s like you’re his maid,” said Patrice. Whether Quentin intentionally behaved this way to discourage tenants from calling him with housing problems was hard to say, but it had that effect.5