Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  Mrs. Mytes was grateful for the extra money, even if it was E-24. She could smell the trailer standing ten feet away. Inside, the mess was pathological. There were ashtrays and cigarettes on the floor; the sink was piled high with food-encrusted dishes; black grime had overtaken the toilet; trash was everywhere; several spots in the carpet were damp with cat piss; and honey-colored strips of fly tape dangled from the ceiling. Theo and his girlfriend had moved in a hurry, leaving behind piles of stuff: a pair of roller skates, a motorcycle helmet, a couch, a full toolbox, a toy helicopter, a driver’s license. Mrs. Mytes began hauling everything to the Dumpster. After a few loads, she asked Office Susie for a pair of rubber gloves.

  Rufus the junk collector appeared at the door. “Whoa,” he said, looking around. “I hate to say it, but even niggers are cleaner than this.”

  Mrs. Mytes let out a loud “Ha!” and kept working.

  Rufus was there for the metal. He had been a full-time junk collector since 1984 and was proud that his life “didn’t revolve around a mailbox” as it did for his neighbors who waited each month for their SSI checks. Tobin had asked Rufus to pull out the microwave, refrigerator, dryer, and any other larger items. He was yanking on the dishwasher when Tobin walked in. Wearing pressed khaki pants and a polo shirt, Tobin narrowed his eyes. He was unfazed, having seen this kind of mess before. “Okay, Rufus,” Tobin said. “Let’s get this shit out of here and see where we stand.”

  It took Rufus two hours to load everything into the bed of his old blue Chevy. Tobin didn’t pay him anything, but he collected almost $60 from the scrap yard. It took Mrs. Mytes five straight hours. Tobin paid her $20.

  Once the trailer was cleared out, Tobin placed an advertisement in the paper. Soon, couples were coming to look, and Tobin offered them the Handyman Special. He apologized for the condition of the trailer—it still smelled of cat urine and smoke, some windows were broken, and the black grime on the toilet was still there—but as consolation he threw in a couple months’ free rent. A few weeks after Theo left, Tobin had a new pair of tenants in E-24. The couple began to use the money they were saving on rent to fix up their new home. Two months later, they began paying Tobin $500 a month in lot rent.

  Office Susie thought Tobin had shortchanged Mrs. Mytes, but she didn’t say anything. She called Tobin’s other workers, who cut the grass or picked up trash for beer money, “regular trailer park tramps.” Tobin fired the tramps after Alderman Witkowski stipulated he hire outside maintenance help, but some kept on working out of boredom or the hope that Tobin would still pay them something. Troy, a bony, out-of-work motorcycle mechanic, was one of them. He had even helped mop up the sewage spill that had made the news. For that, he got nothing but an earful from his common-law wife, Samantha.

  “What are we supposed to do!” Samantha had yelled in her uniform from George Webb, a Wisconsin-based chain restaurant that served breakfast all day long. They were behind in rent and were hoping that Tobin would credit them something for Troy’s eight hours of puke work, even if Tobin had not hired him for the job. “You cleaned up shit! Human shit!”

  “I’ll tell you,” Troy said. “I’ve cleaned up horse shit, when I was shoveling stables. I’ve cleaned up chicken shit. But I ain’t never had to clean up human shit. It was terrible.”

  “I know, ’cause you smelled bad!” Samantha took a breath. “I’m a bitch,” she continued. “I’m a bitch. And, Troy, you don’t got no bitch in you.”

  Troy dropped his head in quiet agreement, taking a sip of a milk shake that Samantha had brought home from work. “Tobin wants to whine and cry all the time,” he said. “The guy’s filthy rich, and he still wants money. He makes more than a million dollars on this park.” He gestured toward the line of trailers. “Add it up.”

  Alderman Witkowski had quoted a similar number, estimating that Tobin’s trailer park netted more than $900,000 a year. Both Troy and Witkowski arrived at that figure by multiplying Tobin’s 131 trailers by the average monthly rent ($550). It was a sloppy calculation that assumed Tobin didn’t have any expenses or vacancies—and that his tenants always paid their rent in full.

  Tobin didn’t have a mortgage: he had bought the trailer park for $2.1 million in 1995 and paid it off nine years later.2 But he did have to pay property taxes, water bills, regular maintenance costs, Lenny’s and Office Susie’s annual salaries and rent reductions, advertising fees, and eviction costs. After accounting for these expenses, vacancies, and missing payments, Tobin took home roughly $447,000 each year, half of what the alderman had reported.3 Still, Tobin belonged to the top 1 percent of income earners. Most of his tenants belonged to the bottom 10 percent.

  Troy finished the milk shake. “Did that hit the spot, baby?” Samantha asked, rubbing his shoulder.

  14.

  HIGH TOLERANCE

  Scott had no intention of fighting his eviction. He skipped his court date and never talked to Tobin about it. Instead, he focused his efforts on finding another place to live. After several calls, Pito from Narcotics Anonymous came through. Pito worked with landlords, repairing and filling their properties, and vouched for Scott to one he knew. The two-bedroom upper was on the near South Side. It was small and bare with a treacherous balcony and no shower. But the landlord was only asking $420 a month and didn’t bother with a background check.

  The apartment also came with Pito’s nephew, who went by D.P. A baby-faced nineteen-year-old with several tattoos and earrings, D.P. had recently been released from prison, where he was serving time for weapons possession and tampering with a firearm. He had sawed off the barrel of a shotgun. D.P. ran with the Cobras and wanted a gun in case things heated up with the Kings. In prison, he got his GED and another tattoo that read BEGINNING.

  One day, Pito learned from another landlord that an old man had died in a nearby trailer park and no one had come to claim his things. So he arranged for Scott and D.P. to clean out the trailer in exchange for them keeping whatever they wanted. In the dead man’s closet, Scott had found a pressed suit in a zipped garment bag and a silk-lined suitcase. In the bathroom, he had learned the man’s name from mailing stickers on American Legion magazines. But Scott found the cigarette burns next to the bed most revealing. They led him to speculate that the man was on morphine. In Scott’s mind, drugs explained a lot about the world: why this man had died alone, why Pam and Ned got tossed from the trailer park, and why he was in a stranger’s home, collecting shabby furniture for his apartment.

  The new roommates loaded a dresser and sofa onto the oily bed of a Ford F-150. When the truck was full, D.P. started the engine and turned on loud rap music. Scott would have preferred something else—his favorite song was “Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel—but he didn’t say anything.

  Scott was still on Mira’s crew, but work had slowed. Mira had run through her jobs too quickly by working her men twelve hours a day, lugging washers and dryers, mattresses, sleeper sofas. When workers said they were exhausted or sore, Mira sold them painkillers. But Scott thought she charged too much. When he needed relief, he would ask Heroin Susie to meet him somewhere.

  “I want to do what Pito’s doing,” D.P. said. “I want to come home clean and leave the house clean. I can’t see myself at thirty doing this bullshit.”

  Scott couldn’t either, years ago, when he was D.P.’s age.

  After unloading the furniture, D.P. and Scott shared a beer on their front steps. The apartment was on Ward Street, on the west side of Kinnickinnic Avenue, which the locals shortened to “KK.” It faced an undeveloped plot of land surrounding railroad tracks and was not far from an apartment Scott used to rent years ago, when he was still a nurse and living in Bay View, a thriving neighborhood that attracted young professionals, artists, and hipsters. From their stoop, Scott and D.P. could see the crowning dome of the Basilica of St. Josaphat. One hundred years ago, Polish parishioners had emptied their savings accounts to fund the massive building project, “a scaled-down version of St. Peter’s in Rome.”1 As S
cott drank his beer, he joked about “taking his own vow of poverty….All I’m going to do is buy some food and clothes and some drugs now and again.”

  D.P. said nothing.

  “Damn,” Scott said after the moment had passed. “My neck and back are killing me.” His shifts with Mira were beginning to take a toll.

  “Why don’t you go to the doctor?” D.P. asked.

  “Because I don’t think there’s anything they can do.” Scott paused. “They could give me Percocet! Too bad I’d eat them all in one day.”

  —

  Scott still bought his Vicodin at the trailer park. He thought Mrs. Mytes was the only adult there who didn’t do drugs or have a history with them. Scott loved drugs. Being high was a “mini vacation” from his shame of a life. He took the trip whenever he could afford it.

  Scott had gotten high with Pam and Ned shortly before they received their eviction notice and had moved in a hurry, leaving behind a couch, beds, dressers, and other large items. Scott figured Ned and Pam got what was coming to them. In his old life, before the fall, he might have been more sympathetic. But he had come to view sympathy as a kind of naïveté, a sentiment voiced from a certain distance by the callow middle classes. “They can be compassionate because it’s not their only option,” he said of liberals who didn’t live in trailer parks. As for Ned and Pam, Scott thought their eviction came down to their crack habit, plain and simple. Heroin Susie agreed with him. “There’s a common denominator for all evictions,” she said. “I almost got evicted once. Used the money for other things.”

  Trailer park residents rarely raised a fuss about a neighbor’s eviction, whether that person was a known drug addict or not. Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They “helped get rid of the riffraff,” some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.2

  In years past, renters opposed landlords and saw themselves as a “class” with shared interests and a unified purpose. During the early twentieth century, tenants organized against evictions and unsanitary conditions. When landlords raised rents too often or too steeply, tenants went so far as to stage rent strikes. Strikers joined together to withhold rent and form picket lines, risking eviction, arrest, and beatings by hired thugs. They were not an especially radical bunch, these strikers. Most were ordinary mothers and fathers who believed landlords were entitled to modest rent increases and fair profits, but not “price gouging.” In New York City, the great rent wars of the Roaring Twenties forced a state legislature to impose rent controls that remain the country’s strongest to this day.3

  Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience—this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision. “For a protest movement to arise out of [the] traumas of daily life,” the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have observed, “the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable.”4 This usually happened during extraordinary times, when large-scale social transformations or economic disturbances—the postwar housing shortage, say—profoundly upset the status quo. But it was not enough simply to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them—which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.

  During rent strikes, tenants believed they had a moral obligation to one another.5 If tenants resisted excessive rent hikes or unwarranted evictions, it was because they invested in their homes and neighborhoods. They felt they belonged there. In the trailer park, that sentiment was almost dead. For most residents, Scott among them, the goal was to leave, not to plant roots and change things. Some residents described themselves as “just passing through,” even if they had been passing through nearly all their life. One, an out-of-work father of three who powered his trailer with stolen electricity, said, “We don’t let family come here. It’s not us. It’s lower-class living, and I didn’t come from this.” Lenny’s ex-wife, who being Lenny’s ex-wife was virtually married to the trailer park at one time, liked to tell people, “You forget that I’m the one that used to go to the opera.” Tam, the pregnant drug addict, thought of the trailer park “as a hotel.”

  Poor neighborhoods provided their residents with quite a lot. In the trailer park, residents met people who knew how to pirate cable, when the best food pantries were open, and how to apply for SSI. All over the city, people who lived in distressed neighborhoods were more likely to help their neighbors pay bills, buy groceries, fix their car, or lend a hand in other ways, compared to their peers in better-off areas.6 These exchanges helped people on the receiving end meet basic material needs; and they helped those on the delivering end feel more fully human.

  But for such vital exchanges to take place, residents had to make their needs known and acknowledge their failures. For Larraine to ask her neighbor if she could use her shower, she needed to explain that her gas had been shut off. That fact became public when she walked back to her trailer with wet hair. On another occasion, a tenant named Rose had her children taken by Child Protective Services. Trailer park residents sat beside her as she wailed. They comforted her and made sure she didn’t hurt herself, but because they saw what had happened, they also judged her. “It ain’t nothing to be proud of,” Dawn told her. “But the Lord took ’em for some reason.”7

  When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice, full of “all sorts of shipwrecked humanity,” they lost confidence in its political capacity.8 Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma—believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addiction, and other harrowing events—were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives.9 This lack of faith had less to do with their neighborhood’s actual poverty and crime rates than with the level of concentrated suffering they perceived around them. A community that saw so clearly its own pain had a difficult time also sensing its potential.

  Every so often, Tobin’s tenants would air a passing remark about their landlord’s profits or call him a greedy Jew. “That Cadillac got some shiny rims. I know that didn’t cost no ten dollars.” “He just wants to butter his pockets.” But for the most part, tenants had a high tolerance for inequality. They spent little time questioning the wide gulf separating their poverty from Tobin’s wealth or asking why rent for a worn-out aluminum-wrapped trailer took such a large chunk of their income. Their focus was on smaller, more tangible problems. When Witkowski reported Tobin’s annual income to be close to $1 million, a man who lived on the same side of the park as Scott said, “I’d give two shits….As long as he keeps things the way he’s supposed to here, and I don’t have to worry about the freaking ceiling caving in, I don’t care.”

  Most renters in Milwaukee thought highly of their landlord.10 Who had time to protest inequality when you were trying to get the rotten spot in your floorboard patched before your daughter put her foot through it again? Who cared what the landlord was making as long as he was willing to work with you until you got back on your feet? There was always something worse than the trailer park, always room to drop lower. Residents were reminded of this when the whole park was threatened with eviction, and they felt it again when men from Bieck Management began collecting rents.11

  —

  It had been a bad week. First Scott lost his keys and decided to break into his apartment by putting a fist through the front window. Then his electricity went out. Then Mira fired him. Nothing personal: she had found a crew of hypes willing to work for $25 a day. In NA, Scott had learned that addiction tightened its grip when you were hungry, angry, lonely, or tired—“HALT”—and Scott was all four. After Mira fired him, he used part of his last paycheck to get drunk and high at a friend’s house. That’s when he called his mom, a hospital housek
eeper in rural Iowa. On the phone, Scott told his mother about his drinking (but not the heroin) and about losing his nursing license after getting hooked on painkillers. She knew none of it. Scott hadn’t spoken to his mother in over a year.

  “Mom,” Scott was crying. “I’m sorry. I’m a mess. I’m a fucking mess.”

  Before Scott could finish, his mother cut him off, failing to realize that it took everything he had in him (and a twelve-pack) to dial all ten numbers and not hang up when he got to the seventh or ninth, like he usually did. She explained that she was in a van full of relatives and unable to talk at the moment. They were all going to Branson, Missouri, for the weekend. “But, Scott,” she said, “you know that you can always come home.”

  Scott thought about her offer. How could he get to Iowa with no car and no money for a train ticket? And how could he find heroin there? After a day, the sick would start working its way through his body. Then there was the part about being an object of pity. Scott thought about this as he walked through Pick ’n Save the day after the call. He had offered to buy Heroin Susie lunch with his food stamps if she’d give him a hit. “I mean, I could go back home, but, damn, I’m forty fucking years old…I’d have to go back and tell them, you know, that I fucked my whole fucking life up.” Scott had never reached out to his family for help. He considered their lawns and jobs and children and normal problems and concluded, “They wouldn’t know what to do….How much help could they possibly be?” Middle-class relatives could be useless that way.

  Scott joined the checkout line and noticed the man in front of him was buying Robitussin.