—
The owner of the trailer park was named Tobin Charney. He lived seventy miles away, in Skokie, Illinois, but visited the trailer park every day except Sunday. He paid Office Susie $5 an hour and reduced her rent to $440. Tobin waived Lenny’s rent and paid him a salary of $36,000 a year, in cash. Tobin had a reputation for being flexible and understanding. But no one thought him a pushover. A hard man with squinting eyes and an unsmiling face, he had a gruff, hurried way about him. He was seventy-one, the same age as Mrs. Mytes, and worked out regularly, keeping a gym bag in the trunk of his Cadillac. He was not chummy with his tenants or amused by them; he did not pause to ruffle their children’s hair. He did not pretend he was anything he was not. His father had been a landlord and at one point owned almost 600 units. All Tobin desired was one address and 131 trailers.
But in the final week of May 2008, he found himself on the verge of losing them. All five members of Milwaukee’s Licenses Committee had refused to renew Tobin’s license to operate the trailer park. Alderman Terry Witkowski, a longtime South Sider with a pinkish face and silver hair, was leading the charge. Witkowski pointed to the 70 code violations that Neighborhood Services had documented in the past two years. He brought up the 260 police calls made from the trailer park in the previous year alone. He said the park was a haven for drugs, prostitution, and violence. He observed that an unconnected plumbing system had recently caused raw sewage to bubble up and spread under ten mobile homes. The Licenses Committee now considered the trailer park “an environmental biohazard.”
On June 10, the city council, called the “Common Council” in Milwaukee, would vote. If the Licenses Committee’s decision stood, Tobin would be out of a job and his tenants would be out of a home. That’s when the newspeople showed up with gelled hair and shoulder-mounted cameras that looked like weapons. They interviewed residents, including some outspoken critics of Tobin.
“The media paints us as ignorant half-breeds,” Mary was saying to Tina outside her trailer.
“They said this was the ‘shame of the South Side,’?” Tina replied.
Both women had been in the park for years, and both had strong, windblown faces. “My son hasn’t slept because of this,” Mary went on. “Neither have I or my husband….You know, I work two jobs. I work hard. I mean, I can’t afford to go anywhere else.”
Mrs. Mytes walked up and put her face right up next to Tina’s. Tina took a step back. “That son of a bitch!” Mrs. Mytes began. “I’m gonna call the alderman, and I’m gonna give him a piece of my mind! That son—”
“See, but that won’t help,” Tina cut in.
“I’m gonna go, and I’m gonna give that alderman a piece of my mind,” Mrs. Mytes replied. “That little son of a bitch!”
Tina and Mary shook their heads as Mrs. Mytes stomped off. Then Mary turned serious. “And to be told to move to the North Side is not funny,” she said. “It’s not funny.” She shook a little and broke eye contact to keep from crying.
That was the heart of it, what trailer park residents feared the most. When Mary and Tina and Mrs. Mytes and the whole trailer park talked about having to leave, what they were talking about was the possibility of having to move into the black ghetto. Office Susie was one of several residents who had previously lived on the North Side, where her adult son had had a gun stuck in his face. “The alderman said this is a ghetto slum,” she vented. “I’ll show you a ghetto!” The situation twisted Susie’s stomach so much that her son hid her pain pills, fearing she’d swallow a handful.
The trailer park had ten days before the final vote. So tenants hosted a barbecue for the media, began calling local representatives, and started to recite what they would say to the Common Council. Rufus the junk collector, with his trim red beard and distant blue eyes, wrote up his comments and practiced. “And then I’ll say, ‘Who has been behind on their rent, five hundred dollars?’ And the hands will go up. And I could keep going: ‘Seven hundred? A thousand?’ And all the hands would go up.” Rufus planned to end his speech by saying, “This is no slumlord. This is not a bad man.”
If his speech didn’t work and the trailer park was closed, Rufus was planning to put a reciprocating saw to the trailers and sell the aluminum.
—
Tobin worked with his tenants. He let them pay here and there. When tenants lost their jobs, he let some of them work off the rent. He would sometimes tell Lenny, “They may be slow paying, but they’re good people.” He lent a woman money to attend her mother’s funeral. When the police picked up the drunks responsible for cutting grass and collecting litter in the trailer park, Tobin bailed them out of jail.
Tobin’s negotiations with tenants were rarely committed to writing, and sometimes tenants remembered things differently from the way Tobin did. A tenant would say she owed $150 and Tobin would say it was $250 or $600. Tobin once forgot that a tenant paid a year’s worth of rent in advance after winning a workers’ compensation claim. Trailer park residents had a word for this: being “Tobined.” Most chalked this up to old age or forgetfulness, though Tobin was only forgetful in one direction.
It took a certain skill to make a living off the city’s poorest trailer park, a certain kind of initiative. Tobin’s strategy was simple. He would walk right up to a drug addict or a metal scrapper or a disabled grandmother and say, “I want my money.” He would pound on the door until a tenant answered. It was almost impossible to hide the fact that you were home. It was hard to hide much of anything. Office Susie knew when your check arrived; she put it in your mailbox. And Lenny could plainly see if you had enough money to buy cigarettes or beer or a new bike for your kid but not enough to pay the rent. When a tenant opened the door, Tobin would thrust out his hand and say, “You got something for me?” Sometimes he knocked for several minutes. Sometimes he walked around the trailer, slapping the aluminum siding. Sometimes he asked Lenny or another tenant to rap on the back door while he assailed the front. He called tenants at work, even talking to their supervisors. When caseworkers or ministers would call and say “Please” or “Wait just a minute,” Tobin would reply, “Pay me the rent.”
Tobin was not going to forgive and forget losing hundreds or thousands of dollars or settle for half of what he was owed or price a trailer below market value. When tenants fell behind, he had three options. He could let it slide and watch his income fall, he could begin eviction proceedings, or he could start a conversation.