Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  Crystal was supposed to continue the housing search, but she decided to stop by her church instead. Mt. Calvary Pentecostal Church was on Sixtieth and National, on the far Southwest Side of the city but still accessible by bus. It was a handsome brick building with stained-glass windows and rain gutters painted fire-engine red. It was Monday night, so the church’s food pantry was open.

  Crystal picked up a bag of groceries and accepted a hot dog from her minister. Bishop Dixon teased Crystal about texting during the service, and Crystal countered by asking the old man if his teeth ever fell out when he was giving the blessing. She told Sister Atalya to bring her dog to church. “Why not? Maybe she can get the Word too.” They laughed. Elder Johnson was there, in a preachy mood. “If we really got Jesus in our souls,” he said, “I’m supposed to be able to feel your pain, and you’re supposed to be able to feel my pain.”

  Elder Johnson didn’t feel Crystal’s pain. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, like Vanetta thought; it was that he didn’t know. Elder Johnson, Bishop Dixon, Sister Atalya—none of them knew Crystal was staying at the Lodge. Only Minister Barber knew. Crystal didn’t want members of her church to reduce her, to see her as an object of pity, a member of “the poor and the orphaned.” She wanted to be seen as Sister Crystal, part of the Body, the Beloved. Crystal received a bag of food once in a while; and congregants had opened their homes to her for a night or two. But her church was in no way equipped to meet Crystal’s high-piled needs.10 What her church could offer was the peace.

  “What’s your favorite verse, Sister?” Elder Johnson asked. He had seen Crystal lift one of the nearby Bibles.

  “Don’t be trying to put me on the spot.” She smiled. Then she said, “ ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.’ ”

  —

  Crystal and Vanetta kept looking for a place to live. Sometimes Vanetta took her kids with her; sometimes she took them to the day care or to stay with her older sister, Ebony. Vanetta had them with her when she and Crystal visited their thirty-second apartment, on Fifteenth Street and Madison. The landlord stepped out of his Saab and opened the door to a small two-bedroom unit. The showing was scheduled in the evening because the landlord had a government day job in Madison. He was a well-fed Puerto Rican man in pleated slacks and a dress shirt.

  The place was small, dumpy, and without a bathtub. After a walk-through, Vanetta asked the landlord if he had any other units with tubs. He said he did and began describing another apartment. It was bigger and somewhat nicer than the place he was showing Vanetta and Crystal, but the rent was the same. Then, suddenly, as if forgetting something, the man stopped himself. His hand went for his pocket, and he answered his cell phone. It was obvious to Vanetta and Crystal that no one had called, but he pretended to have a conversation. Hanging up, the landlord said that it had been his partner on the other line and that he had just rented out the bigger and nicer unit.

  The women stood outside and watched the Saab pull away. Crystal reached for her old MP3 player and put in headphones. Vanetta was shaking. “I’m so angry,” she whispered.

  “Get it together, you have to heal your heart,” Crystal sang, eyes closed, swaying back and forth.

  “He just like, ‘Oh, they black. They trash the place anyways.’ ” Vanetta wiped a tear away with a quick swipe and sucked in her quivering bottom lip. Her kids looked up at her, confused.

  “Get it together, you can fly, fly,” Crystal lifted her voice.

  Most Milwaukeeans believed their city was racially segregated because people preferred it that way. But the ghetto had always been more a product of social design than desire.11 It was never a by-product of the modern city, a sad accident of industrialization and urbanization, something no one benefited from nor intended. The ghetto had always been a main feature of landed capital, a prime moneymaker for those who saw ripe opportunity in land scarcity, housing dilapidation, and racial segregation.

  Maybe it began in the late fifteenth century, the weaponry of war to blame. With the invention of the iron cannonball, cities could no longer rely on moats and modest ramparts to fend off attack. Complicated systems of defense had to be constructed and cities had to grow vertically behind high walls. Old Geneva and Paris saw tenements climb six stories. Edinburgh boasted of tenements twice as high. While agrarian families were driven from the land to increasingly congested cities, the competition for space drove up land values and rents. Urban landlords quickly realized that piles of money could be made by creating slums: “maximum profits came, not from providing first-class accommodations for those who could well afford them…but from crowded slum accommodations, for those whose pennies were scarcer than the rich man’s pounds.”12 Beginning in the sixteenth century, slum housing would be reserved not only for outcasts, beggars, and thieves but for a large segment of the population.

  During its rapid period of urbanization, America imported this model. Colonial proprietors adopted the institutions and laws of England’s landed gentry, including the doctrine of absolute liability for rent, which held tenants unequivocally responsible for payments even in the event of fire or flood. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, America’s poor lived in cellars, attics, cattle sheds, and windowless rooms that held multiple families.13 Some slums were cut off from basic municipal services and local wells; so families begged for water in other parts of town.14 Rents continued to rise as living conditions deteriorated. Soon, many families could not afford their housing. When this happened, landlords could summon the “privilege of distress,” which entitled them to seize and sell tenants’ property to recover lost profit, a practice that persisted well into the twentieth century.15

  Racial oppression enabled land exploitation on a massive scale. During slavery, black slaves pulled profit from the dirt but had no claim to the land. After the Civil War, freed slaves saw in landownership the possibility of true liberation, but during Reconstruction wealthy whites maintained a virtual monopoly on the soil as lands seized from or abandoned by Confederates were restored to their original owners. Returning to plantations as sharecroppers, black families descended into a cycle of subsistence farming and debt, while white planters continued to grow rich.16 The slave shacks stood, and so did the plantation mansions.

  In the early decades of the twentieth century, African-American families seeking freedom and good jobs participated in the Great Migration, moving en masse from the rural South to cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. When they arrived in those cities, they were crowded into urban ghettos, and the vast majority depended on landlords for housing.17 Ghetto landlords had a segregated and captive tenant base and had nothing to gain by improving their run-down houses. They began dividing their properties into small “kitchenette” units, throwing up so many plywood walls their apartments resembled “rabbit warrens.” Many houses lacked heating and complete plumbing. So black families cooked and ate in winter coats and relieved themselves in outhouses or homemade toilets.18 They came to know well the sound of the tuberculosis cough. In 1930, the death rate for Milwaukee’s blacks was nearly 60 percent higher than the citywide rate, due in large part to poor housing conditions.19 For the first time in the history of America, New Deal policies made homeownership a real possibility for white families, but black families were denied these benefits when the federal government deemed their neighborhoods too risky for insured mortgages and officials loyal to Jim Crow blocked black veterans from using GI mortgages.20 Over three centuries of systematic dispossession from the land created a semipermanent black rental class and an artificially high demand for inner-city apartments.21

  In the 1950s, white real estate brokers developed an advanced technique of exploitation, one that targeted black families shut out of the private housing market. After buying houses on the cheap from nervous white homeowners in transitioning neighborhoods, private investors would sell these houses “on contract” to black families for double or triple their assessed value. Black buyers had to come up with sizea
ble down payments, often upwards of 25 percent of the property’s inflated value. Once they moved in, black families had all the responsibilities of home ownership without any of the rights. When families missed payments, which many did after monthly installments were increased or necessary housing upkeep set them back, they could be evicted as their homes were foreclosed and down payments pocketed. The profits were staggering. In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landlord simply replied, “That’s why I bought the building.”22

  The 1968 Civil Rights Act made housing discrimination illegal, but subtler forms prevailed. Crystal and Vanetta wanted to leave the ghetto, but landlords like the one on Fifteenth Street turned them away. Other landlords and property management companies—like Affordable Rentals—tried to avoid discriminating by setting clear criteria and holding all applicants to the same standards. But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans. When Crystal and Vanetta heard back from Affordable Rentals, they learned their application had been rejected on account of their arrest and eviction history.

  Eviction itself often explained why some families lived on safe streets and others on dangerous ones, why some children attended good schools and others failing ones. The trauma of being forced from your home, the blemish of an eviction record, and the taxing rush to locate a new place to live pushed evicted renters into more depressed and dangerous areas of the city.23 This reality had not yet set in for Vanetta and Crystal. They were just coming out of the first, fresh-feeling phase of house hunting. It was only after they had tried for over fifty apartments that Crystal and Vanetta began reluctantly scouting in the inner city. The new friends were circling back to the ghetto but not fully committing to it.

  —

  Crystal had been working to keep her emotions in check. It was why she chose to stop by church Monday night instead of looking for housing. It was why she grabbed her music and sang after the incident with the landlord on Fifteenth Street. “This is too much, too much stress. But I’m not gonna make myself sick,” she said. When Crystal finally did blow up, it was at one of the shelter’s maintenance men, over clean linens he refused to supply. She was already in trouble for sleeping through a mandatory job training. Crystal blamed her sleep apnea. After the altercation with the maintenance man, Crystal was told to be out by breakfast the next morning.

  Crystal spent the following day on the phone, trying to find someone who would open their doors to her. With no luck and night coming on, she sighed and called Minister Barber, who found an older couple in the congregation who agreed to help. Crystal spent the night in their La-Z-Boy recliner.

  The following evening, after Bible study at Mt. Calvary, Crystal returned to the elderly couple’s house. Rain was falling hard onto dark, empty streets. It was that icy, bitter rain that comes when winter first begins to thaw into spring. Crystal knocked, and the husband cracked the door without unlatching the chain. The house was on Fourteenth and Burleigh, in one of the most crime-ridden areas of the city. Seeing Crystal, the man kept the chain taut, handed over a small bag of Crystal’s things, and shut the door.

  Crystal figured it was because she didn’t “hit their hand.” But she didn’t have any money to give, having lent one of her cousins $400, mostly from her casino winnings. Her cousin needed rent money. When Vanetta heard about that, she said, “Crystal, if I was there I would have smacked the mess outta you! You don’t have a place to stay yourself. I don’t care if they your family or not, you been homeless for a grip, and you need a roof over your own head.”

  Sometimes Crystal couldn’t help herself, like the time she and Vanetta were eating lunch at McDonald’s, and a boy walked in. He was maybe nine or ten in dirty clothes and with unkempt hair. One side of his face was swollen. The boy didn’t approach the counter. Instead, he wandered slowly through the tables, looking for scraps.

  Crystal and Vanetta noticed him. “What you got?” Crystal asked, riffling through her pockets. The women pooled what they had to buy the boy dinner. Staring up at the menu, Crystal wrapped her arm around the boy like she was his big sister. She made sure he was okay, handed him the food, and sent him away with a hug.

  “Reminds me of when we was kids,” Vanetta said, shaken.

  Crystal watched the boy dash across the street. “I wish I had me a house. I would take him in.”

  On Burleigh Street, the wind-pushed rain fell sideways in sheets. In the yellow beam of the streetlight, it looked like an unending school of silvery fish darting through the light before disappearing into the surrounding pool of darkness. Crystal considered her phone. It was almost eleven o’clock at night. She dialed a number. Her cousin who owed her didn’t pick up. She dialed a number. Her foster-care mother said her house was full. She dialed a number. She dialed and dialed and dialed and dialed.

  21.

  BIGHEADED BOY

  Sherrena had Lamar and Kamala’s torched building bulldozed. She used the insurance money to buy two new duplexes, doubling the units she had lost to the fire. When the Hinkstons looked out their back window, all they saw was a vacant lot. The only remaining visible reminder of that night was a makeshift memorial Kamala and her family set up: stuffed animals and photographs tied to a tree with a cotton sash cord. The most prominent photograph showed the baby in an Easter dress, her calm eyes large in her small face. For the animals, they had selected rabbits, bears, a goose, a raccoon, and a hippopotamus. Candles in glass vases and Coke cans circled the base of the tree.

  Natasha was sorting through a garbage bag of baby clothes a friend had picked up at a church pantry. She moved her hands tenderly and smiled at each miniature item. The idea of becoming a mother was growing on her.

  “I want my baby to have my looks,” Natasha said. “I don’t want my baby lookin’ like Malik. He got some big ol’ buck eyes.”

  “You so mean!” Doreen said.

  “He all black.”

  Overhearing, Patrice came into the dining room, wearing her Cousins Subs uniform. “Your baby gonna come out lookin’ like a whole lotta folks,” she teased.

  “No!” Natasha laughed.

  Patrice sighed and changed the subject. “We got to do something about this toilet, fam.” The toilet was stopped up again. So was the kitchen sink, brimming with gray water lined with a rust-orange film. Periodically, someone would bucket it out. This made washing difficult, and dirty pots and plates began accumulating on the counter. So did more roaches and other bugs.

  Doreen didn’t call Sherrena about the plumbing. She didn’t want a lecture and figured she wouldn’t help anyway, since they were still behind. She didn’t call a plumber either. Even if she could come up with the money, that would feel too much like helping Sherrena, and nobody was interested in doing that, especially after the courthouse letter Patrice had received a few days back. It said she owed $2,494.50—the result of her second and third causes hearing.1

  “I live in that house for four months,” Patrice had said. “She said I owe her twenty-four hundred dollars!”

  “That means you didn’t pay any rent at all,” Doreen said.

  “Nah! Now you just making up stuff.” Patrice stared at the bill. She thought she owed more like $900.

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know what I can do.”

  The Hinkstons expected more of their landlord for the money they were paying her. Rent was their biggest expense by far, and they wanted a decent and functional home in return. They wanted things to be fixed when they broke. But if Sherrena wasn’t going to repair her own property, neither were they. The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house.2

  The worse the Hinkstons�
�� house got, the more everyone seemed to become withdrawn and lethargic, which only deepened the problem. Natasha started spending more time at Malik’s. Doreen stopped cooking, and the children ate cereal for dinner. Patrice slept more. The children’s grades dropped, and Mikey’s teacher called saying he might have to repeat, mainly because of so many missed homework assignments. Everyone had stopped cleaning up, and trash spread over the kitchen floor. Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health: not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.

  It was once said that the poor are “constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.”3 Especially for poor African American families—who live in neighborhoods with rates of violence and concentrated poverty so extreme that even the worst white neighborhoods bear little resemblance—living in degrading housing in dangerous neighborhoods sent a clear message about where the wider society thought they belonged.4 “Honestly, this place is a shack,” Doreen once said. Not long after that, Ruby came through the door and announced that “a man just got killed right in front of the store.” Growing up in a shack in the ghetto meant learning how to endure such an environment while also learning that some people never had to. People who were repulsed by their home, who felt they had no control over it, and yet had to give most of their income to it—they thought less of themselves.5

  The older children found some reprieve from the apartment in the public library on Center Street. C.J., Ruby, and Mikey liked playing on the computer best. Ruby would begin her time there by checking in on “her house,” which she had gradually built up and improved through a free online game called Millsberry, a marketing tool created by General Mills. Her house was located on Bounty Drive in Golden Valley. It had clean, light-reflecting floors, a bed with sheets and pillowcases, and a desk for doing schoolwork. Doreen or Patrice could have walked to the library and searched for new housing on the Internet. But they never did. This was partially because paying Sherrena back meant they didn’t have enough money to move; partially because like most black renters they didn’t search for housing online; and partially because the family had sunk into a hazy depression.