Evicted (8 page)

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.

“Go ahead.” Sherrena laughed. “But my money is longer than yours.”

“If I'm giving you my money, why ain't my stuff fixed?”

The next month, Patrice tried a different approach. If Sherrena wouldn't respond when the rent was paid, maybe she would respond when it wasn't. Patrice gave Sherrena half the rent and said she would get the rest after she completed the promised repairs. As it was, the rent took 65 percent of Patrice's income. It was hard to give up such a big chunk of her paycheck to live in such conditions.

Patrice's plan backfired. Sherrena refused to work on Patrice's place unless she delivered her rent in full. To Patrice, it felt like a catch-22. If she was paid up, Sherrena often didn't answer the phone until the first of the month rolled around again. If she withheld rent, Sherrena refused to fix anything until she paid. “I'm not going to rush and bust my ass to take care of a bunch of issues, and you didn't pay me all my money,” Sherrena said. Still, Patrice wanted to stay. She liked living above her momma and thought the apartment could be nice. Then Patrice's manager at Cousins Subs cut back her hours, and she lost what little leverage she had. After Sherrena served her the eviction notice, Patrice couldn't catch up. She promised to give Sherrena her tax refund, but by that time it was too late. Belinda, the payee and Sherrena's new best friend, had called asking for a place, and Sherrena jumped at the opportunity. Patrice's place would be available in a few weeks, Sherrena promised.

After two months without a working bathtub or sink and with a barely working toilet, Doreen decided to call a plumber herself. Having paid for a plumber the first time things got stopped up, Sherrena was not keen to do so again. And after what had happened at Thirty-Second Street, Doreen knew better than to call a building inspector. The plumber charged $150 to snake out the pipes. He concluded that the plumbing system was old and vulnerable and advised Doreen to catch everything she could from going down the sink. The first thing Doreen did after the man left was to run a hot bath and soak in it for an hour.

Doreen decided to deduct the $150 from her rent. When Sherrena responded by saying that would earn her an eviction notice, Doreen went ahead and withheld all her rent. If she was going to get evicted, she might as well save her money to put it toward the next move.
7
It was a common strategy among cash-strapped renters. Because the rent took almost all of their paycheck, families sometimes had to initiate a necessary eviction that allowed them to save enough money to move to another place. One landlord's loss was another's gain.
8

If Doreen had to move, she knew she wouldn't be able to find a much cheaper place, especially for three adults and five children. At the time, median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee was $600. Ten percent of units rented at or below $480, and 10 percent rented at or above $750.
9
A mere $270 separated some of the cheapest units in the city from some of the most expensive. That meant that rent in some of the worst neighborhoods was not drastically cheaper than rent in much better areas. For example, in the city's poorest neighborhoods, where at least 40 percent of families lived below the poverty line, median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was only $50 less than the citywide median.
10
Sherrena put it like this: “A two bedroom is a two bedroom is a two bedroom.”

This had long been the case. When tenements began appearing in New York City in the mid-1800s, rent in the worst slums was 30 percent higher than in uptown. In the 1920s and '30s, rent for dilapidated housing in the black ghettos of Milwaukee and Philadelphia and other northern cities exceeded that for better housing in white neighborhoods. As late as 1960, rent in major cities was higher for blacks than for whites in similar accommodations.
11
The poor did not crowd into slums because of cheap housing. They were there—and this was especially true of the black poor—simply because they were allowed to be.

Landlords at the bottom of the market generally did not lower rents to meet demand and avoid the costs of all those missed payments and evictions. There were costs to avoiding those costs too. For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetually behind; and many poor tenants would be perpetually behind because their rent was too high.

Tenants able to pay their rent in full each month could take advantage of legal protections designed to keep their housing safe and decent. Not only could they summon a building inspector without fear of eviction, but they also had the right to withhold rent until certain repairs were made.
12
But when tenants fell behind, these protections dissolved. Tenants in arrears were barred from withholding or escrowing rent; and they tempted eviction if they filed a report with a building inspector. It was not that low-income renters didn't know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them.

“I think callin' a building inspector is only gonna cause more problems,” Doreen told Patrice.

“It does,” Patrice answered. “She can put us out if we call a building inspector.” What Patrice meant was that Sherrena could evict them because Doreen had violated the terms of her lease—Patrice and her kids were “unauthorized boarders”—and that she likely would if DNS were phoned.

When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond by neglecting repairs. Or as Sherrena put it to tenants: “If I give you a break, you give me a break.” Tenants could trade their dignity and children's health for a roof over their head.
13
Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem.
14
More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems—as were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did not.
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Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted. But from a business point of view, this arrangement could be lucrative. The four-family property that included Doreen's and Lamar's apartments was Sherrena's most profitable. Her second-most profitable property was Arleen's place on Thirteenth Street. In Sherrena's portfolio, her worst properties yielded her biggest returns.
16

Shortly after Doreen told Sherrena she would be withholding her rent, Natasha discovered she was four months pregnant. When she told her momma, Doreen laughed and said, “I told you so!” She had noticed the changes Natasha had tried to ignore. Doreen was thrilled. “I'm about to be a proud grandmother again,” she crowed. Natasha's boyfriend was thrilled. A new pregnancy, legitimate or otherwise, was something to celebrate—unless you were a young woman trying to live free and independent.
17
Natasha was devastated.

“It's probably a bigheaded boy!” Doreen teased.

“I don't see how in the
world
I got pregnant,” Natasha whined. “I don't even like pregnant stomachs.”

Natasha and Malik had been dating for about a year. They had met at Cousins Subs, where Malik worked with Patrice. He was shorter and darker than Natasha, with cornrows and a strong face. He had a gentle way about him, and although he was thirty-three, this would be his first child. Natasha liked him okay. But her heart still belonged to Taye, gunned down in a botched robbery two years earlier, when he was seventeen. In her purse, she still carried his funeral program, which listed Natasha as “a special lady friend” among his survivors. Ruby was crazy about that boy too, and sometimes with Natasha's prodding she would tell Taye stories. As Natasha listened quietly, she would smile like older people do when they've put some distance between themselves and the pain. In those moments it was as if some cruel force had wedged a vise between the sisters and sprung the crank, propelling Natasha beyond her years.
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Per Hinkston family tradition, Patrice would be the one to name the baby. Malik had other plans. When Natasha told Doreen and Patrice that Malik wanted the name to be Malik Jr. if it was a boy, they scoffed. “We don't do juniors,” Doreen said. “We messed up once. I hate that I did that.” C.J. was named after his father, but so the family wouldn't have to utter that man's name, they shortened Caleb Jr. to C.J.

If Natasha had to be a mother, she knew this much: she was not going to bring her baby into that house. Now that she was pregnant, she worried more about the apartment and about where they would go if Sherrena decided to evict them. But Doreen had carried the family on her back before, and Natasha believed she would do it again. “My momma, she strong,” Natasha said. “And she's got us out of way worse situations than this. I mean, from shelters, livin' on the street, churches, cars. I got a lot of faith in my momma. Yeah, we've been on the street a few times, but my momma, she always had it.” Only this time, Natasha didn't like her momma's plan. Ever since learning about an upcoming family reunion in Brownsville, Tennessee, Doreen had been thinking about moving the family down there. Patrice liked the idea; she was done with Milwaukee. “This a dead city,” she said, “full of crackheads and prostitutes.” But Natasha didn't want to take her baby away from its father.