Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  Four days after the baby came, Belt Buckle called and told Pam and Ned that their application had been approved. Pam had two evictions on her record, was a convicted felon, and received welfare. Ned had an outstanding warrant, no verifiable income, and a long record that included three evictions, felony drug convictions, and several misdemeanors like reckless driving and carrying a concealed weapon. They had five daughters. But they were white.

  Pam would have preferred the Packard Avenue apartment. Even if it was smaller, it was in Cudahy. But that landlord had said no. Their eviction and conviction records pushed them out of white neighborhoods and into an area that families living on the North Side dreamed of moving to.

  Ned squandered it. Three days after moving in, he got into a drunken altercation with the upstairs neighbors. The landlord gave them a week to find a new place. That was all the time they needed. Ned found a clean two-bedroom apartment in a working-class white area near Dirky’s garage, going for $645. It had a pear tree out front. Ned applied by himself, leaving Pam and her two black daughters off the lease. “People like single dads,” he told Pam. The landlord approved him.

  “The landlord doesn’t know about me or the two girls?” Pam asked.

  “Nope, but give it some time. I had to get a house, and I got us this place in a week.” Ned raised his hands as if accepting applause. “See, good things happen to good people.”

  Soon after moving in, a neighbor hooked Ned up with a construction job and Pam began working as a medical assistant. Ned told Bliss and Sandra to tell the landlord they didn’t live there, if she ever asked. He told them a lot of things, like: “You’re as stupid as your father” and “You’re a half-nigger snitch.” One day he got a kick out of getting all the girls to march around the house chanting, “White power!”

  It emptied Pam out. She prayed it wouldn’t hurt the girls in the long run. She prayed for forgiveness, for being a failure of a mother. But she felt that circumstances bound her to Ned. “This is a bad life,” she told herself. “We aren’t doing crack, but we are still dealing with the same fucking shit….I’ve never been in a position to leave.” The best she could do was to tell her girls, when they were alone, that Ned was the devil. Some nights, before she fell asleep, Pam wondered if she should take her girls to a homeless shelter or under the viaduct. “As long as we’re together and we’re happy and positive things are said. And I just want to tell them that they’re beautiful, ’cause my girls are the strongest little women in the world.”

  —

  Arleen tried a large apartment complex on Silver Spring Drive. (Ali, Number 88, never called back.) She dialed the number, and the building manager agreed to show her a unit on the spot.

  “We home Jafaris!” Jori yelled, smiling.

  “Don’t tell him that,” Arleen said.

  “This is our home, man!” Jori joked again, elbowing his brother.

  “Stop sayin’ that!” This time, Arleen yelled it imploringly.

  After another showing, another application, they were back on the sidewalk.

  “I’m hungry,” Jafaris said.

  “Shut up, Jafaris!” Arleen snapped.

  After a few minutes, Arleen dug in her pocket, found enough change, and stopped by McDonald’s to buy Jafaris some fries.

  Near the end of the day, Arleen and the boys made their way to their old place on Thirteenth Street. Arleen had left a pair of shoes there. As they approached the house, they saw Little outside in the snow, pawing at the door. Jori and Jafaris ran to him. Jori picked up Little and handed him to Jafaris, who pulled him in and kissed him.

  “Put it down, dang!” Arleen yelled. She jerked Jafaris’s arm back, and Little fell to the ground.

  When Arleen was alone, she sometimes cried for Little. But she was teaching her sons to love small, to reject what they could not have. Arleen was protecting them, and herself. What other self-defense was there for a single mother who could not consistently provide for her children? If a poor father failed his family, he could leave the way Larry did, try again at some point down the road.11 Poor mothers—most of them, anyway—had to embrace this failure, to live with it.

  Arleen’s children did not always have a home. They did not always have food. Arleen was not always able to offer them stability; stability cost too much. She was not always able to protect them from dangerous streets; those streets were her streets. Arleen sacrificed for her boys, fed them as best she could, clothed them with what she had. But when they wanted more than she could give, she had ways, some subtle, others not, of telling them they didn’t deserve it. When Jori wanted something most teenagers want, new shoes or a hair product, she would tell him he was selfish, or just bad. When Jafaris cried, Arleen sometimes yelled, “Damn, you hardheaded. Dry yo’ face up!” or “Stop it, Jafaris, before I beat yo’ ass! I’m tired of your bitch ass.” Sometimes, when he was hungry, Arleen would say, “Don’t be getting in the kitchen because I know you not hungry”; or would tell him to stay out of the barren cupboards because he was getting too fat.

  You could only say “I’m sorry, I can’t” so many times before you began to feel worthless, edging closer to a breaking point. So you protected yourself, in a reflexive way, by finding ways to say “No, I won’t.” I cannot help you. So, I will find you unworthy of help.12

  Ministers and church ladies, social workers and politicians, teachers and neighbors, police and parole officers throughout the black community would tell you that what you were doing was right, that what these young black boys and girls needed was a stern hand. Do not spare the rod. What began as survival carried forward in the name of culture.13

  As they walked away from Thirteenth Street and Little and the detritus of their things still scattered in the snow, Jafaris opened his hand to reveal a pair of earrings.

  “Where’d you get these from, Jafaris?” Arleen asked.

  “Stole ’em from Crystal.”

  “Oh, wow.” A pause, then: “That’s not funny, and it’s not nice, Jafaris. You hear what I’m saying?” Jafaris’s face fell. He just wanted to do something sweet for his momma. Arleen knew this and was touched. She would return the earrings later, but for the moment, she put them on. Jafaris smiled.

  They had one more stop to make. As the sky grew inky blue and temperatures fell, Arleen met a white landlord in a flannel shirt and tool belt, fixing up a two-bedroom apartment with such haste and stress Arleen wondered if the inspector was coming the next day. She filled out an application, and Jafaris used the bathroom. It was too late when he discovered the toilet didn’t flush. Arleen thanked the landlord and, taking Jafaris by the hand, rushed out.

  A few minutes later, her phone rang. “That was very rude!” the landlord was yelling. “And I don’t like children like that.”

  Arleen and her boys could stay in the shelter for twenty-nine more days.

  20.

  NOBODY WANTS THE NORTH SIDE

  The Lodge sat on the corner of Seventh and Vine Streets, near downtown. On most days, residents gathered near the entrance, talking, smoking, and running after their children. That was where Crystal had been spending most of her time since the final days of February. On Crystal’s eviction court papers, Sherrena had checked the box next to “the LANDLORD desires the premises for the following reason(s),” writing in: “Causing substantial disturbances with upper and lower tenants (with police involvement). Also, unauthorized subleasing to an evicted tenant.” Crystal was confused by the whole process. Could Sherrena call Arleen “unauthorized” when she knew about their arrangement from the start? She packed her things into two clear garbage bags and left without going to court, wrongly assuming that doing so would keep her name clean.

  Crystal hated the food at the Lodge, and some of the maintenance men propositioned the residents for sex, offering fresh sheets, snacks, or extra shampoo.1 But she liked her room. It was warm, clean, and free. Said Crystal, “I ain’t paying no five fifty and feel like I’m getting nothing.” Plus, she was on the hunt for
a new friend, and the Lodge was a great place to find one. It collected under a single roof dozens of people who had found themselves in especially desperate situations, who were all “going through a thing,” as shelter residents put it.2

  People were attracted to Crystal. She was gregarious and funny with an enduring habit of slapping her hands together and laughing at herself. She would saunter out the doors of the Lodge, singing gospel, her hands raised in praise. Crystal had some suitors, but what she wanted most of all from her new friends, and what she had wanted from Arleen, was a mother figure. She found one in Vanetta.

  Vanetta Evans had been staying at the Lodge since January. At twenty, she was not much older than Crystal, but she’d grown up fast. Vanetta had her first child, Kendal Jr., when she was sixteen; then a daughter, Tembi, the next year; and a third the year after that: a boy named Bo-Bo. You might say Vanetta was raised in the Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago’s infamous public housing towers, or you might say that her mentally challenged mother, whom Vanetta and her siblings unaffectionately called Shortcake, raised her “in almost every homeless shelter in Illinois and Wisconsin.” Crystal liked the way Vanetta carried herself. She was always put-together, with her hair pulled back tight in a small ponytail. She even wore her cell phone on a belt holder, like a landlord. Vanetta’s dark-brown skin matched Crystal’s, and she had a smoky, lounge-singer voice that she almost never raised at her kids. She could snap them in line by giving them the Look. When Kendal Jr. acted up, Vanetta pretended to call Big Kendal, his father, on the phone. The boy knew she was faking but would calm down anyway. When Bo-Bo had seizures, she rushed him to the hospital.3

  The two women began swapping cigarettes, each keeping mental note of the number of Newports given and received. Soon they upped the ante, taking incremental but expedited steps toward establishing a relationship of reciprocity. They exchanged snacks, then small bills, then meals purchased at fast-food restaurants. Through passing references, they began learning about the other’s resources—Vanetta received $673 a month from welfare and $380 in food stamps—as well as their character and temperament. Crystal and Vanetta began calling each other “sister.”4 After a week, they decided to look for housing together. Roommates inside the homeless shelter would become roommates outside of it.

  Crystal didn’t think she needed to worry about Vanetta’s upcoming sentencing hearing. “Prayer is a powerful thing,” she said. Vanetta thought her chances of avoiding prison were decent even without Jesus. It was her first offense.

  The trouble had started when Old Country Buffet slashed Vanetta’s hours. Instead of working five days a week, she would now only work one. Her manager blamed the recession. After that, Vanetta couldn’t pay her electricity bill. We Energies threatened disconnection unless she paid $705. There was no way she could pay that and the rent. But she worried that Child Protective Services would take her kids away if her lights and gas were shut off. The thought of losing her children made Vanetta sick to her stomach. Then she fell behind in rent and received an eviction notice. She felt helpless and terrified. Her friend, who had also received the pink papers, felt the same way. One day with Vanetta’s boyfriend, the two women sat in a van and watched another pair of women walk into a Blockbuster carrying purses. Someone suggested robbing the women and splitting the money; then all of a sudden, that’s what they were doing. Vanetta’s boyfriend unloaded his gun and handed it to her friend. The friend ran from the van and pointed the pistol at the women. Vanetta followed, collecting their purses. The cops picked them up a few hours later.5

  In her confession, Vanetta had said, “I was desperate to pay my bills, and I was nervous and scared and did not want to see my kids in the dark or out on the street.” When she turned eighteen, Vanetta had put her name on the list for public housing. Becoming a convicted felon meant that her chances of ever being approved were almost zero.6

  At her plea hearing, the judge told Vanetta that she could be “subject to a fine of up to a hundred thousand dollars, forty years of imprisonment, or both.” Vanetta tried not to think about that. After her hearing, she was fired and then evicted, which was when she took her kids to the Lodge.

  —

  Crystal and Vanetta agreed to look for an apartment exclusively on the Hispanic South Side. When they felt God smiling on them, they even looked in white neighborhoods. They refused to consider the North Side. “It would be nice to get away from these black motherfuckers,” Crystal said.7 They began making daily bus trips to the South Side and calling on rent signs. Even in the age of online apartment listing sites, the humble rent sign remained a visible and effective beacon, especially in minority neighborhoods. Only 15 percent of black renters looking for housing relied on the Internet. By not consulting print or online listings, Crystal and Vanetta constricted their options to what they could see with their own eyes, often from a foggy bus window.8

  The new friends looked at a small two-bedroom unit but turned down an application when they learned the landlord didn’t allow smoking. They hung up when a landlord answered in Spanish. “You want six fifty for a two-bedroom? You outta your mind,” Crystal told one landlord. After calling a dozen apartments, Vanetta suggested they try Affordable Rentals. You wouldn’t know it from its tiny, storefront office on National Avenue, one of the South Side’s main motorways, but Affordable Rentals was a giant in Milwaukee’s low-income rental market. The company owned over three hundred rental units and managed almost five hundred more.9

  “Don’t get ghetto in there,” Vanetta reminded Crystal as they walked toward the door.

  Inside, they put down a deposit and the receptionist behind thick glass handed them a master key so they could inspect the units on their own. The places were small but clean, except for the one with diapers and tires in the backyard. The gem of the bunch was a two-bedroom apartment—with a tub—renting for $445. Vanetta wanted a tub so her kids could take baths. The women rushed back and filled out an application. A paper taped to the wall announced Affordable Rentals’ screening criteria:

  WE REJECT APPLICANTS FOR THE FOLLOWING REASONS:

  1. First time tenants without a cosigner

  2. Any evictions within the last 3 years

  3. Felony drug or violent crime conviction within the last 7 years

  4. Misdemeanor drug or disorderly conduct crime charges within the last 3 years

  5. Non-verifiable income or insufficient income

  6. Non-verifiable rental history or any bad reference from a previous landlord

  Crystal and Vanetta paid no mind to the sign. On their rental application, Vanetta listed her twin brother as a reference. Crystal listed her spiritual mom.

  As she waited to hear back from Affordable Rentals, Vanetta wondered if they needed to look at units priced over their $550 limit. But she didn’t want to go higher, mainly because she didn’t know if Crystal was able to hold on to her money. At the Lodge, Vanetta had watched Crystal spend down her check on clothes, fast food, and even slot machines at the casino. “Girl, I’m gonna punch you in the mouth,” Vanetta would vent. A healthy chunk of Crystal’s money also went into the offering basket the first Sunday of every month.

  “I’m sowing seeds,” Crystal said as the women sat down at George Webb. It was Crystal’s treat. She had won $450 at Potawatomi Casino the night before, using a $40 birthday present from her foster care agency to play the slots. The waitress brought Crystal the cup of hot water she requested. She slid her silverware in the cup to clean it. “Remember how I explained to you last time? If you a farmer and you plant your seeds for your corn and your vegetables and all that, and you water and take care of it, your crops gonna come. That’s how I look at it when I sow seeds in the church. I need something from God. So I sow a seed….I need a house. I need financial breakthrough. I need healing from stuff. I need to be made whole. That’s how I’m gonna put it.”

  Vanetta held her chilled look. “That’s why I don’t creep with your church, ’cause they don’t have nothing to offer
you, but they got a lot to say. And I don’t like that. And then you go to them and tell them the situation that’s going on, and it’s like they don’t care.”

  Crystal looked at her food. “I dunno,” she said. “It’s, I’m just waiting to move.” She tried to change the subject. “That cheesecake bangin’.”

  But Vanetta was not through. “Don’t ball up your face,” she said. “Motherfuckers smile in your face when you tithe.”

  “Nuh-uh!” Crystal shook her head.

  “You be throwing all that money in they basket! Don’t say ‘nuh-uh’ ’cause I seen it when I went Sunday.”

  Vanetta knew how much Crystal’s church meant to her. She had heard Crystal run on about Minister Barber and the bishops and the Holy Ghost and all that. She had watched Crystal take herself to church on Sundays, Tuesdays, Fridays, and sometimes Saturdays for special services. If the congregation at Mt. Calvary Pentecostal wasn’t Crystal’s family, who was? But Crystal’s church was Vanetta’s biggest competition. Every seed Crystal sowed in the offering basket left Vanetta with less money for their budding household. Vanetta didn’t know if what she’d said had penetrated until later that day, when she came upon Crystal crying into her phone and praying in tongues: “Eeh Shanta. Eeh Shanta.”

  When late afternoon arrived, Vanetta had to be back for her GED class. “Don’t go,” said Crystal.

  “I can’t miss. I want that diploma,” Vanetta answered.

  “You can’t miss?”

  “Only in a real emergency.”

  “Bitch, you looking for housing. This is a real emergency.”

  Vanetta smiled and left.