Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  When Pana heard about it, he made Arleen a deal. If she left by Sunday, he’d return her rent and security deposit; if she didn’t, he would keep her money and evict her. Children didn’t shield families from eviction; they exposed them to it.2

  Arleen took the deal, and Pana was nice enough to help her move. She pulled her dishes out of the clean cupboards and took her decorations off the walls. When Arleen had finished stuffing everything into trash bags and recycled boxes, Pana loaded his truck and drove Arleen’s things right back to storage.

  Arleen had lost the pretty house and felt miserable about it.3 “Why it’s like I got a curse on me?” she wondered. “I can’t win for losing. No matter how hard I try.”

  —

  Arleen called Trisha and told her how angry the landlord was when he found out she had been going door-to-door asking for a joint. It really was the police visit that did her in, but years of hardship had taught Arleen how to ask for help, and one particularly effective method involved addressing a person’s guilt, framing things so that someone looked like a real bastard if he or she turned you down.4 “The least you can do is to help me if you’re the one that got me put out.”

  Trisha told Arleen to come on over.

  There was a new street memorial on Thirteenth Street. Jafaris noticed it. “Someone got shot there,” he said in his six-year-old voice. When they arrived at the old address, the boys ran up to Trisha’s apartment to see Little. But Little was dead. A car had ground him into the pavement. When Trisha told Jori, he tried to keep himself from crying. He paced around Trisha’s apartment and sleeve-attacked the snot sliding from his nose. He found a foam mannequin’s head. There was always random stuff like that lying around Trisha’s place. Jori knelt over the head and turned it faceup. He hit the face with a closed fist. He kept hitting it. Soon he was grunting, and his punches flew faster and harder and louder until Arleen and Trisha screamed at him to stop.

  Trisha didn’t hide the fact that she had begun turning tricks. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. Men would just show up, and Trisha would take them into her bedroom, telling Arleen, “Look, I’m about to get us some cigs.” Trisha would emerge later with eight or ten dollars. Once, Jori walked in to find a man in bed with Trisha, his pants on the floor next to them and her lipstick smeared. In crowded houses, there were no separate spaces, and children quickly learned the ways of adults.

  Trisha kept at it even after her new boyfriend moved in. Arleen sensed that he encouraged her to. She also figured it was the boyfriend who told Trisha to raise Arleen’s monthly rent to $150, from $60. The man went by a string of nicknames; Trisha called him Sunny. He was a thirty-year-old man who had just served five years for selling drugs. Skinny, with a smooth walk, he bragged about having nine children by five different women and joked about taking a spatula to Trisha. When Trisha got money from johns or her payee, Sunny would take it. If Trisha called after Sunny on the street, he would ignore her and later hiss, “Don’t call me ‘babe’ in public.” Trisha would ball up under the covers with her clothes on or sit on a windowsill and light a cigarette, its smoke coming alive in the breeze like a raging spirit that had only seconds to live.

  Sunny’s parents and one of his sisters moved in soon after Arleen did. Trisha’s small one-bedroom apartment, which was in bad shape to begin with, began to buckle under the weight of eight people. The toilet broke and the kitchen sink started leaking. The leak got so bad that the floor filled with water that would ripple when Jori stepped in it. He spread old clothes on the ground to sop it up.

  “It looks like slums,” Arleen said. “Kitchen all nasty, floor all nasty. Bathroom.” She thought about what to do next. “What’s beyond this? What’s to come? It can’t get no worser.”

  Then a Child Protective Services caseworker showed up asking for “Ms. Belle.” It was not Arleen’s usual caseworker but one she’d never met before. She knew Arleen was living there—Sherrena didn’t even know that—and she knew about the toilet and the sink. The caseworker opened the refrigerator and grimaced. Arleen pointed out that it was the end of the month. She had gone shopping, but there were eight mouths to feed.5

  The CPS worker said she’d be back. Arleen became nauseous with anxiety and secretly suspected Trisha had reported her. She needed to escape, somehow. So she called J.P. Her dependable cousin picked her up and rolled her a blunt. It helped. So he rolled another. “J.P. always tries to make me forget about all my stress,” Arleen said the next day.

  —

  Finally, spring had come to the city. The snow had melted, leaving behind wet streets edged in soggy garbage. On the same day, the whole ghetto realized there was no longer a need to brace and tighten when stepping outside. People overreacted without regret. Boys went shirtless, and girls put lotion and sun on their legs long before it was actually hot. Chairs and laughter returned to porches. Children found their jump ropes.

  Arleen and her boys had spent the past several days alone in Trisha’s apartment. She relished the peace and quiet. Trisha and Sunny and Sunny’s people had disappeared. Arleen didn’t give it any thought, figuring they were visiting kin or friends. But on May 1, movers stormed Trisha’s apartment. They came with gloved hands, ready to work, but ended up looking at each other bewildered, trying to figure out what they should pack and what they should trash. Belinda, Trisha’s payee, had contracted the men. She would later come check on their progress, pulling up in a new Ford Expedition XLT with temporary license plates from the dealership. Chris had been released and came by the apartment looking for Trisha. Belinda didn’t think her client was safe on Thirteenth Street anymore.

  Arleen stared out the front window. “This is too much for me,” she mumbled. She had stayed with Trisha for a month and a half.

  Jafaris came home from school with braids on one side of his head. He watched the movers lugging out mattresses and dressers and shoving handfuls of clothes into black trash bags. To this scene, he had no reaction. He did not cry or ask a question or run to check on a special possession. He simply turned around and went outside.

  —

  They stayed a while with Arleen’s sister, who wanted $200 a month even though Arleen and the boys didn’t have their own room. During that time Arleen lost everything she had in storage: her glass dining table, the armoire and bedroom dresser she had acquired at Thirteenth Street, her air-conditioning units. She had given Boosie the money to pay it, but he lost or stole it. Then Arleen’s welfare case was closed because she missed three appointments; the letters had once again been mailed to an address she was evicted from. “It won’t stop for nothing,” she said. Arleen eventually found another run-down apartment on Thirty-Fourth and Clarke, by the Master Lock factory. “Maybe this will be the end of it,” she told herself. Arleen found enough stability to start looking for jobs. But not long after an interview at Arby’s, she and her boys were robbed. Two men ran into her apartment and stuck a pistol in Jori’s face. Arleen’s caseworker told her the place was no longer safe, causing Arleen to flee once again to a shelter. Rents continued to rise. Arleen’s next apartment took $600 of her $628 monthly check. It was only a matter of time before her lights were shut off. When that finally happened, Jori went to live with Larry, and Child Protective Services placed Jafaris with Arleen’s sister.

  Arleen began to unravel. “Just my soul is messed up,” she said. “Sometimes I find my body trembling or shaking. I’m tired, but I can’t sleep. I’m fitting to have a nervous breakdown. My body is trying to shut down.”

  Arleen stood back up. She borrowed money from her aunt Merva to get her lights back on, and her boys came back. She took another apartment on Tamarack Street, near Tabernacle Community Baptist Church. This apartment had no stove or refrigerator, but they boiled hot dogs in a crockpot or went to St. Ben’s to eat beef stroganoff with the winos.

  Sometimes Arleen would head out to a food pantry and Jafaris would ask, “Will you get me some cakes, Momma?”

  Arleen would smile and say, �
�You know I’ll try if they have them.”

  Jori had been thinking about his future. He wanted to become a carpenter so he could build Arleen a house. “People be not thinking that I can do this. But you watch,” he said.

  Arleen smiled at Jori. “I wish my life were different,” she said. “I wish that when I be an old lady, I can sit back and look at my kids. And they be grown. And they, you know, become something. Something more than me. And we’ll all be together, and be laughing. We be remembering stuff like this and be laughing at it.”

  Epilogue

  HOME AND HOPE

  The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets. We say that at home, we can “be ourselves.” Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home, we remove our masks.

  The home is the wellspring of personhood. It is where our identity takes root and blossoms, where as children, we imagine, play, and question, and as adolescents, we retreat and try. As we grow older, we hope to settle into a place to raise a family or pursue work. When we try to understand ourselves, we often begin by considering the kind of home in which we were raised.

  In languages spoken all over the world, the word for “home” encompasses not just shelter but warmth, safety, family—the womb. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for “home” was often used in place of “mother.” The Chinese word jiā can mean both family and home. “Shelter” comes from two Old English words: scield (shield) and truma (troop), together forming the image of a family gathering itself within a protective shell.1 The home remains the primary basis of life. It is where meals are shared, quiet habits formed, dreams confessed, traditions created.

  Civic life too begins at home, allowing us to plant roots and take ownership over our community, participate in local politics, and reach out to neighbors in a spirit of solidarity and generosity. “It is difficult to force a man out of himself and get him to take an interest in the affairs of the whole state,” Alexis de Tocqueville once observed. “But if it is a question of taking a road past his property, he sees at once that this small public matter has a bearing on his greatest private interests.”2 It is only after we begin to see a street as our street, a public park as our park, a school as our school, that we can become engaged citizens, dedicating our time and resources for worthwhile causes: joining the Neighborhood Watch, volunteering to beautify a playground, or running for school board.

  Working on behalf of the common good is the engine of democracy, vital to our communities, cities, states—and, ultimately, the nation. It is “an outflow of the idealism and moralism of the American people,” wrote Gunnar Myrdal.3 Some have called this impulse “love of country” or “patriotism” or the “American spirit.” But whatever its name, its foundation is the home. What else is a nation but a patchwork of cities and towns; cities and towns a patchwork of neighborhoods; and neighborhoods a patchwork of homes?

  America is supposed to be a place where you can better yourself, your family, and your community. But this is only possible if you have a stable home. When Scott was provided with an affordable apartment through the Guest House’s permanent housing program, he was able to stay off heroin, find meaningful work as a resident manager for homeless people, and begin striving for independence. He remains stably housed and sober. And then there are the Hinkstons. After Malik Jr. was born, Patrice and Doreen finally did move to Brownsville, Tennessee, a town of about 10,000. They found a nice three-bedroom place. Out of the rat hole, Patrice earned her GED, impressing her teacher so much that she was named Adult Learner of the Year. Patrice went on to enroll in a local community college, where she took online classes in computers and criminal justice, hoping to one day become a parole officer. She liked to half joke, “I got a lot of friends who are criminal who are going to need my help!”

  The persistence and brutality of American poverty can be disheartening, leaving us cynical about solutions. But as Scott and Patrice will tell you, a good home can serve as the sturdiest of footholds. When people have a place to live, they become better parents, workers, and citizens.

  If Arleen and Vanetta didn’t have to dedicate 70 or 80 percent of their income to rent, they could keep their kids fed and clothed and off the streets. They could settle down in one neighborhood and enroll their children in one school, providing them the opportunity to form long-lasting relationships with friends, role models, and teachers. They could start a savings account or buy their children toys and books, perhaps even a home computer. The time and emotional energy they spent making rent, delaying eviction, or finding another place to live when homeless could instead be spent on things that enriched their lives: community college classes, exercise, finding a good job, maybe a good man too.

  But our current state of affairs “reduces to poverty people born for better things.”4 For almost a century, there has been broad consensus in America that families should spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing.5 Until recently, most renting families met this goal. But times have changed—in Milwaukee and across America. Every year in this country, people are evicted from their homes not by the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands but by the millions.6

  —

  Until recently, we simply didn’t know how immense this problem was, or how serious the consequences, unless we had suffered them ourselves. For years, social scientists, journalists, and policymakers all but ignored eviction, making it one of the least studied processes affecting the lives of poor families. But new data and methods have allowed us to measure the prevalence of eviction and document its effects. We have learned that eviction is commonplace in poor neighborhoods and that it exacts a heavy toll on families, communities, and children.

  Residential stability begets a kind of psychological stability, which allows people to invest in their home and social relationships. It begets school stability, which increases the chances that children will excel and graduate. And it begets community stability, which encourages neighbors to form strong bonds and take care of their block.7 But poor families enjoy little of that because they are evicted at such high rates. That low-income families move often is well known. Why they do is a question that has puzzled researchers and policymakers because they have overlooked the frequency of eviction in disadvantaged neighborhoods.8 Between 2009 and 2011, roughly a quarter of all moves undertaken by Milwaukee’s poorest renters were involuntary. Once you account for those dislocations (eviction, landlord foreclosure), low-income households move at a similar rate as everyone else.9 If you study eviction court records in other cities, you arrive at similarly startling numbers. Jackson County, Missouri, which includes half of Kansas City, saw 19 formal evictions a day between 2009 and 2013. New York City courts saw almost 80 nonpayment evictions a day in 2012. That same year, 1 in 9 occupied rental households in Cleveland, and 1 in 14 in Chicago, were summoned to eviction court.10 Instability is not inherent to poverty. Poor families move so much because they are forced to.

  Along with instability, eviction also causes loss. Families lose not only their home, school, and neighborhood but also their possessions: furniture, clothes, books. It takes a good amount of money and time to establish a home. Eviction can erase all that. Arleen lost everything. Larraine and Scott too. Eviction can cause workers to lose their jobs. The likelihood of being laid off is roughly 15 percent higher for workers who have experienced an eviction. If housing instability leads to employment instability, it is because the stress and consuming nature of being forced from your home wreak havoc on people’s work performance.11 Often, evicted families also lose the opportunity to benefit from public housing because Housing Authorities count evictions and unpaid debt as strikes when reviewing applications. And so people who have the greatest need for housing assistance—the rent-burdened and evicted—are systematically denied it.12

  This—the loss of your possessions, job, home, and access to government aid—helps explain why eviction has such a pronounced effect on what social s
cientists call “material hardship,” a measure of the texture of scarcity. Material hardship assesses, say, whether families experience hunger or sickness because food or medical care is financially out of reach or go without heat, electricity, or a phone because they can’t afford those things. The year after eviction, families experience 20 percent higher levels of material hardship than similar families who were not evicted. They go without food. They endure illness and cold. Evicted families continue to have higher levels of material hardship at least two years after the event.13

  These families are often compelled to accept substandard housing conditions. In Milwaukee, renters whose previous move was involuntary were 25 percent more likely to experience long-term housing problems than similar renters who moved under less trying circumstances.14

  And families forced from their homes are pushed into undesirable parts of the city, moving from poor neighborhoods into even poorer ones; from crime-filled areas into still more dangerous ones. Arleen’s favorite place was nested in a working-class black neighborhood. After the city condemned it and forced her out, she moved into an apartment complex teeming with drug dealers. Even after controlling for a host of important factors, families who experience a forced move relocate to worse neighborhoods than those who move under less demanding circumstances.15 Concentrated poverty and violence inflict their own wounds, since neighborhoods determine so much about your life, from the kinds of job opportunities you have to the kinds of schools your children attend.16

  Then there is the toll eviction takes on a person’s spirit. The violence of displacement can drive people to depression and, in extreme cases, even suicide. One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers.17 When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a “significant precursor of suicide.” The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. “Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.” Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.18