Evicted (23 page)

Beaker stopped himself. Larraine looked pitiful. She had heavy bags under her eyes, and her hair was a mess. It had been days since she last showered. She refused to ask Lane and Susan to use theirs. Beaker knew his trailer might just as well have been an abandoned shed: the heat, hot water, phone, and cable had been cut off. A helpless, dull silence hung between brother and sister.

Then Beaker said, “Take one of those sweaters.”

Larraine had six days to be out of Beaker's trailer. Beaker had written Bieck Management a letter that read, “I'm moving and will be leaving my trailer to Bieck Management for the money I owe them. I'll be out…and so will my sister.” Larraine learned about Beaker's betrayal—that's what it felt like, anyway—when one of Bieck's property managers got her on the office phone three days after she had visited her brother in the Woods Apartments. The manager told Larraine to be out by the first of the month. She had pleaded, “Please, I have no place to go,” and “I'm not this bad person,” but in the end she just said, “I see. I see. Thank you for your time, and God bless you.” Larraine sat down. “I don't know what to do or where to go anymore,” she said. “I have no idea.”

Larraine began looking for a new place to live in the streets surrounding her church. It was the centerpiece of her life; it might as well be the centerpiece of her housing search too. She shuffled gingerly along the icy sidewalks, calling landlords. Then she decided to stop by the housing projects in South Milwaukee, where she grew up. The woman in the office told Larraine they were full and not accepting applications, but she gave Larraine the address to HUD's offices.

The Milwaukee branch of the Department of Housing and Urban Development was located downtown, on a top floor of The Blue, a grand modern tower with a mirrored façade interspersed with rows of candy-blue glass. Larraine's wet shoes squeaked on the lobby's terrazzo floors. The HUD receptionist handed Larraine the Multifamily Housing Inventory Report, thirteen legal-size pages listing all federally assisted rental housing in the metropolitan area. “I have no idea where half of these places are,” Larraine muttered at the long list of addresses and phone numbers. It hardly mattered, since most of the properties were reserved for the physically disabled or elderly. In fact, for years Larraine had assumed that most public housing was exclusively for senior citizens. “And even they, a lot of them, couldn't get low-income housing,” she remembered. “So I thought, if they can't, neither can I.” It was why Larraine had never before thought to apply for public housing.

Politicians had learned that their constituents hated the idea of senior housing a lot less than public housing for poor families. Grandma and Grandpa made for a much more sympathetic case, and elderly housing provided adult children with an alternative to nursing homes. When public housing construction for low-income households ceased, it continued for the aged; and high-rises originally built for families were converted for elderly use.
8

Larraine found two addresses on HUD's Housing Inventory that accepted applications for people who were neither elderly nor handicapped and that were located on the far South Side of the city. Larraine did not consider the near South Side to be an option, let alone the North Side. The application asked if she had ever been evicted. Larraine circled yes and wrote: “I had some complications with the landlord, and he evicted me.”

On the day Larraine had to be out of Beaker's trailer, ice spread over the city. An early December snow had fallen, melted, and, when the temperature dropped, froze. Larraine stood in her kitchen listening to the sawing sounds of people scraping their car windows and chipping the ice from their doors. There was a pile of trash on the floor, mainly Beaker's empty Maverick cigarette boxes and chocolate-milk bottles, and dirty dishes were piled in the kitchen sink. The cold had immobilized Larraine under blankets on the couch—the cold and the question of what to do next. Little had been cleaned since winter had arrived. “I don't care anymore,” she said, swallowing pain relievers and antidepressants.

Larraine had applied to or called on forty apartments. She had had no luck on the private market, and her applications to public housing were still being processed. Larraine didn't know where she was going to go. She was considering approaching Thomas, a man her age who lived alone in the trailer park, or Ms. Betty, whom Larraine knew only as an “old lady who lives across the road.” Larraine packed up her remaining things. Her plan was to pay Public Storage $50 to keep them.

Late in the day, Larraine knocked on Ms. Betty's door. She was a small white woman with crystal eyes and silvering blond hair falling past her shoulders in double braids. Ms. Betty looked younger when seated and enjoying a slow cigarette, but she walked like an old woman, hunched with one arm held close. What the women knew of each other came from passing hellos and rumors. But when Larraine asked Betty if she could stay with her, Betty said yes.

“Sure you can stay with me, until after the winter.” Ms. Betty raised an eyebrow. “I know you're not as big of a problem as they say you are.”

Larraine smiled. “I'll be able to take a shower and everything,” she said.

Betty's trailer might have been the most cluttered in the whole park. There was room for Larraine but little else. Ms. Betty had piled her tables with magazines and old mail and canned food and bottles of soy sauce and candy. In the living room, a tree bent toward the window, shedding its leaves on the floor, and keepsakes were clustered together on shelves next to a picture of Jesus. There was an order to the mess. The bathroom drawers bore a resemblance to the nuts-and-bolts aisle at the hardware store, with all the travel-sized tubes of toothpaste and bobby pins and hair ties and nail clippers grouped together in their own respective compartments. In the kitchen, Betty had hung a sign:
SELF-CONTROL IS DEFINED AS REFRAINING FROM CHOKING THE SHIT OUT OF SOMEONE WHO IS DESPERATELY DESERVING OF IT
. Larraine agreed to pay Betty $100 a month.

A few days after moving in with Ms. Betty, Larraine heard back on her applications to public housing in the form of two rejection letters. Each letter listed a pair of reasons Larraine's applications were turned away: “Collections from the State of Wisconsin” and “Eviction History.”

Larraine understood “Eviction History,” but not “Collections from the State of Wisconsin.” When she called to find out more, she was told she owed property taxes. “Property!” She laughed after getting off the phone. “I'd love to know how I owe property taxes.”
9

Betty thought Larraine should appeal. She looked over the top of her large glasses and said, “You have to fight, Larraine. I had to fight for my Medicaid.”

“I don't have the energy,” Larraine answered. “And I don't feel like getting rejected again.”
10

Betty nodded. She understood.

A few days later found Larraine in an especially religious mood, her church's Truth Class fresh in her mind.

“When you look at Jesus, what do you see?” Larraine asked Betty.

“A hottie,” Betty replied without missing a beat. A long, unlit cigarette shot out of her lips like a plank from a ship.

“Oh, Betty!” Larraine giggled.

Betty sauntered over and tapped the Jesus picture. “Hottie,” she repeated. “I've always liked men with facial hair.”

“Naughty, Betty,” Larraine cooed.

The new friends talked and laughed into the night. On the couch, they fell asleep at the same time.
11

The cheapest motel Pam could find charged $50 a night. They checked in and started calling friends and relatives, hoping someone would take them in. Two days passed without any luck, and Pam began to worry. “Everybody we knew weren't answering our phone because they knew we needed a place to stay,” she said.

Then Ned lost his part-time construction job. He was fired for the two days of work he missed when helping his family move from the trailer park. Job loss could lead to eviction, but the reverse was also true.
1
An eviction not only consumed renters' time, causing them to miss work, it also weighed heavily on their minds, often triggering mistakes on the job. It overwhelmed workers with stress, leading them to act unprofessionally, and commonly resulted in their relocating farther away from their worksite, increasing their likelihood of being late or missing days.
2
Ned's firing wasn't out of the ordinary, but that was little consolation for Pam. Their money was running out.

Even so, Ned refused to call his family. Typical, thought Pam. Ned called home to brag but rarely to ask. So Pam worked her phone, calling almost everyone she knew and even churches. Nothing. Finally, a friend agreed to take the girls until Pam and Ned got back on their feet. They dropped off the three oldest girls and kept two-year-old Kristin with them. Then Ned's phone rang around ten p.m. It was Travis, a buddy they used to party with in the trailer park and who had since moved into a nearby apartment complex. Travis offered his couch. Pam breathed a sigh of relief. At least she wouldn't have to bring her new baby back to a cheap motel.

Travis was their first godsend; Dirky was their second. A muscular, white-haired man with a professional-grade mechanic's shop in his garage, Dirky gave Ned an off-the-books job customizing motorcycles. Ned had met him through a mechanic buddy.

After a month at Travis's, Pam and Ned sensed he was about done with them. When Kristin got fussy, Travis would tighten his jaw and shut his bedroom door, and not only because he had to be up at four thirty the next morning for work. The last time Travis let someone stay with him, it was his brother and nephew, and those two drunks got him evicted. Ned would tell Pam to hush her kid, and Pam would tell him that she was his goddamn kid too.

One morning, they drove to Dirky's garage, Kristin and her Care Bear buckled up in the backseat. Pam was due in nine days; they were no closer to a new home than they were the day Tobin kicked them out of the trailer park; they might have to live on the near South Side, with the Mexicans; Ned was out of cigarettes because Pam was smoking more to offset stress and hunger pains; Kristin was throwing a fit because her lovey teddy got thrown in storage after the eviction; Dirky wanted Ned to do a transmission, which would probably mean working deep into the night; and he hated that his family had to rely on Travis. When he turned toward the booming music and saw a car with two young black men in the lane next to him, he hated them too. “Fucking niggers,” Ned bit.

A few minutes later, Ned spotted a rent sign in white, working-class West Allis and told Pam to write down the phone number. She missed it.

“I told you,” Ned said. “I told you the fucking number, and you just can't write it down?”

“Not when you say it so fast!”

“
I'm
not the one with the fucking problem!”

They circled back and got the number. “Hi, I was calling about your place on Seventy-Sixth and Lincoln?…What's that, a two-bedroom?”

“Yep,” a man's voice said. “It's six hundred and ninety-five a month with heat.”

Pam didn't hang up. Maybe he was flexible. “Okay. When is it available?”

“Now.”

“It is? Okay.”

“And who would be living with you?”

“My family.” Pam paused and then decided to tell him about most of the kids. “I've got three children and one on the way. But they're all girls!”

“Oh, no, no, no. We're trying to keep it to all adults.”

“Oh, okay. Thank you.” Pam brought the phone down. “They don't want kids.”

Ned was wearing a black Ozzy Osbourne cutoff T-shirt and a Harley-Davidson cap turned backward. He whistled through his teeth. “I know. As soon as you say you've got four fucking kids, we're fucked.”

Pam knew it didn't even take that. When house hunting a few days earlier, two landlords had turned her away on account of her kids. One had said, “We're pretty strict here. We don't allow no loud nothing.” The other had told Pam it was against the law for him to put so many children in a two-bedroom apartment, which was the most Pam and Ned could afford. When talking to landlords, Pam had begun subtracting children from her family. She was beginning to wonder what was most responsible for keeping them homeless: her drug conviction from several years back, the fact that Ned was on the run and had no proof of income, their eviction record, their poverty, or their children.

Children caused landlords headache. Fearing street violence, many parents in crime-ridden neighborhoods kept their children locked inside. Children cooped up in small apartments used the curtains for superhero capes; flushed toys down the toilet; and drove up the water bill. They could test positive for lead poisoning, which could bring a pricey abatement order. They could come under the supervision of Child Protective Services, whose caseworkers inspected families' apartments for unsanitary or dangerous code violations. Teenagers could attract the attention of the police.

It was an old tradition: landlords barring children from their properties. In the competitive postwar housing market of the late 1940s, landlords regularly turned away families with children and evicted tenants who got pregnant.
3
This was evident in letters mothers wrote when applying for public housing. “At present,” one wrote, “I am living in an unheated attic room with a one-year-old baby….Everywhere I go the landlords don't want children. I also have a ten-year-old boy….I can't keep him with me because the landlady objects to children. Is there any way that you can help me to get an unfurnished room, apartment, or even an old barn?…I can't go on living like this because I am on the verge of doing something desperate.” Another mother wrote, “My children are now sick and losing weight….I have tried, begged, and pleaded for a place but [it's] always ‘too late' or ‘sorry, no children.' ” Another wrote, “The lady where I am rooming put two of my children out about three weeks ago and don't want me to let them come back….If I could get a garage I would take it.”
4

When Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, it did not consider families with children a protected class, allowing landlords to continue openly turning them away or evicting them. Some placed costly restrictions on large families, charging “children-damage deposits” in addition to standard rental fees. One Washington, DC, development required tenants with no children to put down a $150 security deposit but charged families with children a $450 deposit plus a monthly surcharge of $50 per child.
5
In 1980, HUD commissioned a nationwide study to assess the magnitude of the problem and found that only 1 in 4 rental units was available to families without restrictions.
6
Eight years later, Congress finally outlawed housing discrimination against children and families, but as Pam found out, the practice remained widespread.
7
Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.
8

Ned got out of the car and gave Kristin the rest of his McDonald's breakfast sandwich. “Give Daddy a kiss. I'll be working. Love you.” He kissed Pam too.

Pam put her hand to her forehead. “I'm ready to pop.”

“Momma? Playground. Play!” Kristin asked from the backseat.

“No, Kristin. Momma's busy looking for a place for us to live.”

“How old is the child?” the landlord asked.

“Six.”

“Call back next month.”

Arleen hung up. She had called on or applied for eighty-two apartments. She had been accepted to none. Even in the inner city, most were out of her reach. And the landlords of the places she could afford if she handed over everything weren't calling back.

Arleen started again, dialing three more numbers. Too expensive. Automated message. “Call back Monday.” Arleen was exhausted from rushing to the hospital the night before. She had run out of prednisone, and Jafaris had had an asthma attack. It was hard for Arleen to stay on top of his asthma with so many other things to worry about. Once, she ended a long and fruitless day of apartment hunting with the awful realization that she had left a backpack with Jafaris's breathing equipment at a bus stop. After a day without treatment, Jafaris seemed fine. But two days later, he woke up and told Arleen, “Mommy, I don't feel good.” She heard him wheezing and called an ambulance. That time, they had transferred him to Children's Hospital, near the zoo, and kept him overnight. This time, they were able to make it back to the shelter by ten thirty p.m. And the on-call social worker was nice enough to pay for a cab to and from the hospital.

When Number 85 answered the phone, Arleen replied, “Hi!
How
you doing?” instead of “Hi, how
you
doing?” or “Hi, I'm calling about your property.” She had been trying different pitches and bending her voice in different directions. She would tell one landlord one thing and another something else. Sometimes she was in a shelter; sometimes she wasn't. Sometimes she had two children; sometimes one. Sometimes they were in child care; sometimes they weren't. Sometimes she received child support; sometimes she didn't. She was grasping, experimenting, trying out altered stories at random. Arleen wouldn't know how to game the system if she wanted to.

“Is there a man in the picture?” Number 85 asked.

“There won't be no man.”

“Are you going to have men coming over once in a while?”

“No. It's just me and my son.”

“How old is your son?”

Number 86 had wanted $825 a month plus another additional $25 for Jori, but Number 88 had left her with a good feeling.

Number 88 was a large three-story brick building at the end of a dead-end road on Milwaukee's North Side. “I think that at one time it was an institution,” the building manager told Arleen. “Could have been an old people's house or something.”

Mental ward, Arleen guessed. Inside was clean and quiet. The walls were not off-white or beige but hospital-white, rich-people's-teeth white. Dark wood doors with brass numbers opened into long and low-ceilinged hallways. Arleen and the boys followed the building manager and listened to the squeaks of their shoes. Behind the manager's back, Jori lunged at Jafaris, making him jump, and the boys let out a muffled laugh, which helped shake away the creeps.

“My name is Ali,” the building manager said. “It means ‘of noble descent.' ” A straight-backed black man with a brown kufi, Ali wore beige pants and a matching beige shirt, buttoned to the top. He showed Arleen into the first unit. “I got one or two problem tenants,” he said, “but that's it. It's just that some people, they can't get with that Huxtable culture. They more South Central in they culture. And I don't like that culture.”

Arleen looked around the apartment, which was decorated with sparse furniture that probably pre-dated
The Cosby Show
.

“You know,” Ali continued, “doing life like you supposed to be doing. Paying your bills.” He was clearing his throat and speaking stronger now. “In a committed relationship. That's a big one right there. I be on black women. You know, not having no committed relationships, and be Ms. Independent….Let's
bring back
family. If you ain't trying to be about family, then I don't care about sister here, in helping you any sort of way
….I'm about family. About what's right and good.”

Arleen had been smiling at Ali, and he'd just noticed. He was funny.

“Um, you like this one or you want to see another one?”

“Doesn't even matter. I just need a place.”

The rent was $500 for a one-bedroom; the light bill would be in Arleen's name. On the application, next to “Previous landlord?” Arleen wrote, “Sherrena Tarver.” Next to “Reasons for moving?” she decided on “Slumlord.” Arleen hesitated, then went ahead and asked if cats were allowed.

“They say no pets, but I myself I do like cats. Can't stand dogs. So I might be willing to negotiate on that.”

“Well, I'd appreciate it. Um, and we, um.” Arleen looked at Jori. She was mostly doing this for him. He understood that, and it showed in his big brown eyes. “Don't cry, Jori, 'cause you about to make me cry!” Jori quickly turned away and walked to the window.

Arleen decided to stop to see her cousin, J.P. She adored J.P., with his wide face and easy demeanor. “Let's see if his landlord have anything,” she said. Ali was nice, but he wasn't the one who approved applications. Arleen also wanted to check in on her son, Boosie, who had been sleeping at J.P.'s place on Twenty-Sixth Street and Chambers, which might have been the exact middle of the ghetto.

Not long after Larry walked out, Child Protective Services removed Ger-Ger, Boosie, and Arleen's three other children from her care. “I just gave up responsibility,” Arleen remembered. “That really, really hurted me when he did that. I wish I was stronger.” In the years that followed, Arleen's children grew up in and out of foster care. “But Boosie never wanted to come back home,” Arleen said. She remembered Boosie calling CPS when he was fifteen, telling a caseworker that the children had been left alone. “So they came to take my kids again.” She had Jafaris by then. He was two at the time, and Jori was ten. Both boys would later rejoin Arleen, but Boosie and Arleen's other two children from Larry remained in the system. Arleen didn't know why. She did know that their foster families had more money than she did. They could buy her children new clothes, feed them every night, and provide them with their own beds to sleep in. But unlike his younger brother and sister, Boosie didn't stay in the system for long. When he was seventeen, he left his foster family, dropped out of high school, and started selling crack.