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.
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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 adolescence 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
When Doreen phoned Sherrena to complain, she often found herself being complained about. “Every time we call about something,” Doreen said, “she tries to blame it on us, and say we broke it. I’m tired of hearing it….So, we just fix it every time it breaks.”
“Fixing it” often meant getting on without it. The sink was the first thing to get stopped up. After it stayed that way for days, Ruby and Patrice took to washing dishes in the bathtub. But they weren’t able to catch all the food scraps from going down the drain, and pretty soon concrete-colored water was collecting in the bathtub too. So the family began boiling water on the kitchen stove and taking sponge baths. Afterward, someone would dump the pot water down the toilet and grab the plunger, causing a small colony of roaches to scamper to another hiding spot. You had to plunge hard. It usually took a good five minutes before the toilet would flush. When the toilet quit working, the family began placing soiled tissue in a plastic bag to be tossed with the trash.
When Doreen finally did call Sherrena about the plumbing, she could not get ahold of her. After a week of voice messages, Sherrena called back, explaining that she and Quentin had been away in Florida. They had recently purchased a three-bedroom vacation condo there. In response to Doreen’s complaint about the plumbing, Sherrena reminded her tenant that she was breaking the terms of her lease by allowing Patrice and her children to live with her.
To Patrice, it was déjà vu. Before moving upstairs, she had inspected the unit. It needed a lot of work—the lint-gray carpet was worn thin and filthy, the ceiling in the kids’ bedroom was drooping, the balcony door was unhinged, and the balcony itself looked like it would collapse if you tossed a sack of flour on it—but Sherrena promised to attend to these things. Landlords were allowed to rent units with property code violations, and even units that did not meet “basic habitability requirements,” as long as they were up front about the problems.6
Patrice took Sherrena at her word and handed her $1,100: the first month’s rent and security deposit. But the repairs came slowly. Patrice’s bathtub stopped draining, but Sherrena didn’t return her calls. That time, she and Quentin were away on vacation. Patrice went two months without a working sink. When Patrice discovered a large hole in one of the walls, Sherrena gave her a pamphlet about how to keep her children safe from lead paint. When the door came off the hinges, “she sent her dope men over to our house to fix it,” Patrice complained. Things came to a head.
“I’m gonna get an attorney and sue you!” Patrice shouted.