Evicted Read online

The laughter lifted higher when Lamar added, “Can’t call me collect.” He took a drag off the blunt. “Baby boy,” his voice was tender, “I’m fifty-one. If it’s happened, I been through it.”

  “The police ain’t protecting us,” Buck said.

  “I feel you on that. But all polices are not the same….If I was in the neighborhood, and it was rough, I’d want the police to clean that shit up too.” Lamar tossed out the king of diamonds and looked left to DeMarcus. “Go ’head, son. Get it outcha hand.” The ace had already been played, and he figured DeMarcus had the queen. DeMarcus looked back at Lamar, poker-faced through thick glasses.

  “Pops, your neighborhood protect you….If somebody comes through shooting, everybody on the block, everybody who got, haulin’ off shootin’.”

  “Man, I’m a Vietnam veteran. I know I can shoot.”

  Lamar had joined the navy in ’74, after seeing a commercial. He was seventeen. The navy was a blur of boring oceans, exotic locations, shore-leave parties, pills, and blown checks. Lamar couldn’t see why all the floppy-haired college students down in Madison had gone crazy over Vietnam, getting their noggins thumped by police batons and blowing up a university building. Lamar was having a blast. He was dishonorably discharged in 1977.

  “But a bullet ain’t got no eyes,” Lamar continued. “Man, look here, we went to court with DeMarcus.” The game stopped while Lamar told the story. Before DeMarcus’s case was called, Lamar said, they had watched a teenager sentenced to fourteen years for accompanying his older brother when he beat a crackhead to death. “He’s in the courtroom bawlin’ his eyes out.”

  “They on some bull ’cause he a little black boy,” Buck said.

  “Well, then that should make you think, being black.”

  As Buck laughed, DeMarcus slapped his card down: the eight of spades. “Ah! That’s what my momma taught me,” he yelled. Next to all other suits, the spade was the most powerful. DeMarcus slid the book to his pile.

  “Damn,” Lamar said. Then he looked back at Buck. “It ain’t worth it, doing stupid stuff….Prison ain’t no joke. You gotta fight every day in prison, for your life.”

  “I know. But when I get mad, to the extent that I wanna do something, ain’t nothing stoppin’ me.”

  “You better grow up, kid.” As Buck took a long hit off the blunt, Lamar added, “And you need to slow down, smokerrr.” He drew the last word out, using a high-pitched, tinny voice.

  Buck laughed so hard he lost his hit, but the point got through. “I’m straight,” he demurred the next time the blunt was offered.

  When his sons were at school, Lamar listened to oldies while he cleaned and drank instant coffee with sugar. He pushed forward in his wheelchair, set the brake, and swept the dirt into a long-handled dustpan. Instead of stacking the boys into a single bedroom, Lamar had given Luke one bedroom and Eddy the other, their twin beds resting on metal frames. Lamar’s bed sat in the corner of the living room. On the other side was a moss-green couch, team photographs from past football seasons, white silk flowers, and a small fish tank with guppies. The apartment was spare and tidy, full of light. Its pantry bordered on obsessive-compulsive. The Spam was stacked neatly in its place; the cereal boxes lined up at attention; the cans of soup and beans organized by kind and all forward-facing. Lamar had repurposed a Clos du Bois wine rack to hold a small stereo, dishes, and the Folgers can where he kept his tobacco and Midnight Special rolling papers.

  The place had come a long way. When Lamar first came to look at the apartment, it was a mess, with maggots sprouting from unwashed dishes in the kitchen. But Lamar needed a home—he and his sons had been sharing a room in the basement of his mother’s house; she gave all of them a nine p.m. curfew—and saw the place had promise. Sherrena had waived Lamar’s security deposit. She thought he would be approved for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a monthly stipend for low-income people who are either elderly or have mental or physical disabilities. But that hadn’t worked out yet.

  After school let out for the day, the boys would start showing up at Lamar’s—sometimes with and sometimes without Luke and Eddy. Most evenings, by nightfall, everyone would have chipped in for a blunt or two and the cards would come out. Lamar’s approach with his sons, and the boys he treated like sons, was open and avuncular. “You can’t hide nothing from God,” he told them, “so don’t hide it from your daddy. Do what you do at home….I’d rather for you to do it at home around me than out there on them street corners.” As Lamar smoked and laughed with the boys, he handed down advice about work, sex, drugs, cops, life. When the boys complained about girls, Lamar would try to even the scales. “You been talking about girls, but it’s the men, though, that be messin’ up on them.” Lamar reviewed the boys’ report cards and nagged them about finishing their homework. “They think I’m partying with them. I’m watching them.” Lamar could watch them because he was not always away, pulling a long shift. Plenty of people on his block worked; the boys hardly saw those people except when they dashed to their cars, uniforms pressed.

  —

  Lamar had worked several jobs after leaving the navy. He worked as a janitor at multiple places. He drove a forklift and poured chemicals for Athea Laboratories. After he lost his legs, he applied for SSI but was twice denied because, Lamar recalled being told, he could still work in his condition. Lamar wouldn’t argue with that, but good jobs were scarce.

  Milwaukee used to be flush with good jobs. But throughout the second half of the twentieth century, bosses in search of cheap labor moved plants overseas or to Sunbelt communities, where unions were weaker or didn’t exist. Between 1979 and 1983, Milwaukee’s manufacturing sector lost more jobs than during the Great Depression—about 56,000 of them. The city where virtually everyone had a job in the postwar years saw its unemployment rate climb into the double digits. Those who found new work in the emerging service sector took a pay cut. As one historian observed, “Machinists in the old Allis-Chalmers plant earned at least $11.60 an hour; clerks in the shopping center that replaced much of that plant in 1987 earned $5.23.”1

  These economic transformations—which were happening in cities across America—devastated Milwaukee’s black workers, half of whom held manufacturing jobs. When plants closed, they tended to close in the inner city, where black Milwaukeeans lived. The black poverty rate rose to 28 percent in 1980. By 1990, it had climbed to 42 percent. There used to be an American Motors plant on Richards and Capitol, on the city’s predominantly black North Side. It has been replaced by a Walmart. Today in Milwaukee, former leather tanneries line the banks of the Menominee River Valley like mausoleums of the city’s golden industrial age; the Schlitz and Pabst breweries have been shuttered; and one in two working-age African American men doesn’t have a job.2

  In the 1980s, Milwaukee was the epicenter of deindustrialization. In the 1990s, it would become “the epicenter of the antiwelfare crusade.” As President Clinton was fine-tuning his plan to “end welfare as we know it,” a conservative reformer by the name of Jason Turner was transforming Milwaukee into a policy experiment that captivated lawmakers around the country. Turner’s plan was dubbed Wisconsin Works (or W-2), and “works” was right: If you wanted a welfare check, you would have to work, either in the private sector or in a community job created by the state. To push things along, child-care and health-care subsidies would be expanded. W-2 meant that people were paid only for the hours they logged on a job, even if that job was to sort little toys into different colors and have the supervisor reshuffle them so they could be sorted again the next day. It meant that non-compliers could have their food stamps slashed. It meant that 22,000 Milwaukee families would be cut from the welfare rolls. Five months after Milwaukee established the first real work program in the history of welfare, Clinton signed welfare reform into federal law.3

  When W-2 fully replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1997, it provided two types of monthly stipends: $673 for beneficiaries who worked and $628 for those who didn
’t or couldn’t, usually because of a disability. Because Lamar didn’t work, he received the lesser amount, known as W-2 T. After paying $550 in rent, Lamar had $78 for the rest of the month. That amounted to $2.19 a day.

  When Lamar’s welfare benefits started, right after he moved into Sherrena’s apartment, he had mistakenly received two checks. In its Rights and Responsibilities guide, the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families informed clients who have been overpaid: “You may have to repay benefits you receive by mistake regardless of whether it is your fault or the agency’s fault.”4 Tell that to a single father trying to raise two teenage boys on a welfare check. Lamar cashed both checks and bought Luke and Eddy shoes, clothes, and school supplies, along with curtains and furniture for their new apartment. “Of course I spent it. Got my name on it,” he had said when a caseworker contacted him after discovering the error. The caseworker deducted the overpayment from Lamar’s next check, causing him to fall a month behind on rent.

  Lamar thought the basement job he had done for Sherrena and Quentin was worth $250. The basement was covered with mildewed clothes, trash, and dog shit, reminding him of a recurring dream he had where he would crawl into a strange, shadowed basement to buy dope. He refused to ask any of the boys for help, thinking the work beneath them. He cleaned the basement alone, working until his stubs grew too sore. It took him a week. Sherrena credited him $50 for it. He still owed her $260.

  It would have been impossible to get caught up in time by making extra payments. What Lamar had after the rent was paid went to household necessities (soap, toilet paper) and the phone bill. So Lamar sold $150 of food stamps for $75 cash, the going rate in Milwaukee. The refrigerator and pantry would be empty by the end of the month, but Luke and Eddy could ask their grandma for a plate. The other boys already knew to leave Lamar’s food alone.

  It still wasn’t enough. If Lamar wanted to keep his home, he needed another hustle. He spotted one when Patrice moved out. Patrice didn’t put up much of a fight after Sherrena delivered her eviction notice. She had moved upstairs from the lower unit, a two-bedroom, where she and her three small children had been living with her mother, Doreen, and Patrice’s younger siblings. When Patrice was served the pink papers, she and her children simply moved back downstairs.

  When Lamar found out, he figured Sherrena would need to repaint the unit. He asked her to let him do it. Sherrena agreed, saying she would have Quentin drop off the supplies. “Tell him to bring extra, baby. I’m putting together a crew.”

  Buck and DeMarcus showed up, along with Luke, Eddy, and a half dozen other neighborhood boys who had come to see Lamar’s home as their own. They spread out in the spacious two-bedroom apartment, dipped roller and brush into a five-gallon bucket, and started slathering the walls. They worked earnestly and with a quiet seriousness. After a while, some tossed their hoodies and shirts on the floor, painting bare-chested.5

  Lamar paused to take in the scene. Just the previous winter, he had climbed into an abandoned house, high on crack. When the high wore off, he found he couldn’t climb out; his feet had frozen. Lamar kept partying after returning home from the navy. In the mid-1980s, crack hit the streets of Milwaukee, and Lamar started smoking it. He got hooked. His coworkers at Athea knew it because he wouldn’t have cigarette money a couple days after payday. Lamar remembered losing his job and apartment. After that, he took Luke and Eddy to shelters and abandoned houses, tearing up the carpet so they could have a blanket at night. Luke and Eddy’s mother was around back then, but her addiction eventually consumed her, and she gave up her boys. Lamar ate snow during the days he was trapped in the abandoned house. His feet swelled purple and black with frostbite until they looked like rotten fruit. He was delirious when, on the eighth day, he jumped out of an upper-floor window. He would say God threw him out. When he woke up in the hospital, his legs were gone. Except for two brief relapses, he had not smoked crack since.

  “I’m blessed,” Lamar said, looking at Luke and Eddy. The white paint misting from the rollers freckled their black skin. “My boys okay.”

  —

  The following month, Sherrena was driving through heavy rain. Traffic sounded like a thousand mop buckets being tossed out the back door. She was headed to a meeting of the Milwaukee Real Estate Investors Networking Group (RING), at the Best Western Hotel by the airport, on the far South Side of the city. Fifty people showed up, including investors, mold assessors, lawyers, and other players in real estate, but the majority of the people in the room were landlords. Men, mostly—young men in ties, many the sons of landlords but taking notes anyway; foot-tapping middle-aged men in leather jackets and boots; older men in caps and flannel shirts with knuckles like tree knots.6 Sherrena stood out as a woman, and especially as a black woman. Besides her friend Lora, who had moved from Jamaica thirty years ago, Sherrena was the only black person in the room. Almost everyone else was white, with names like Eric, Mark, or Kathy.

  A couple of generations ago, a gathering like this would have been virtually unheard-of. Many landlords were part-timers: machinists or preachers or police officers who came to own property almost by accident (through inheritance, say) and saw real estate as a side gig.7 But the last forty years had witnessed the professionalization of property management. Since 1970, the number of people primarily employed as property managers had more than quadrupled.8 As more landlords began buying more property and thinking of themselves primarily as landlords (instead of people who happened to own the unit downstairs), professional associations proliferated, and with them support services, accreditations, training materials, and financial instruments. According to the Library of Congress, only three books offering apartment-management advice were published between 1951 and 1975. Between 1976 and 2014, the number rose to 215.9 Even if most landlords in a given city did not consider themselves “professionals,” housing had become a business.

  The evening’s speaker was Ken Shields, from the Self Storage Brokers of America. After selling his insurance company, Shields had begun looking for a way to get into real estate. He started out with rooming houses, which meant he started out renting mainly to poor single men. “Very nice cash flow. But I no longer have them.” The room chuckled. “I made some good money, and I mean, I love to get money, but I’m still just as happy not running around and dealing with some of these dregs of society who live in rooming houses.”10 Sherrena, who owned a couple of rooming houses, laughed along with the room. Then Shields found self-storage. “It’s got the residual incomes of an apartment building, but,” he lowered his voice, squinted, “you don’t have the people. You just got their stuff!…This is the sweetest spot in the whole American economy. A receptacle for an enormous cascade of money.”

  The landlords loved Ken Shields, even if he did live in Illinois. When he finished his speech, the room broke into applause. The RING president, a mustached man with a full pouch for a stomach, stood up clapping. When there wasn’t a speaker, he often organized round robins. One such evening, a woman from Lead and Asbestos Information Center, Inc., had started off by announcing, “There is money to be made on lead,” to a room of landlords who more often lost money trying to abate it. One landlord asked whether he would have to report the presence of asbestos to the city or the tenants if he tested for it. “No, you don’t,” the woman had said.

  The conversation moved on and someone else had asked about garnishing wages. A lawyer informed the room that a landlord was allowed to garnish a tenant’s bank account and up to 20 percent of his or her income, but the last $1,000 was exempt. And welfare recipients were off-limits.

  “How about intercepting their tax refund?” Sherrena had asked.

  The lawyer looked a bit stunned. “Noooo, only the governor can do that.”

  Sherrena already knew that. She had looked into it before. Her question wasn’t a question; it was a message to Eric, Mark, Kathy, and everyone else in the room that she would do almost anything to get the rent. Many white landlords knew money could be
made in the inner city, where property was cheap, but the thought of collecting payments on the North Side, let alone passing out eviction notices, made them nervous. Sherrena wanted them to know that she could help. For the right price, she would manage their property or consult with them about where to buy in the ghetto; she would be their broker to black Milwaukee. After that meeting, white landlords had surrounded Sherrena, who had worn a denim jacket with MILLION DOLLAR BABY $ bedazzled in rhinestones on the back. She poked fun as she collected business cards: “Don’t be afraid of the North Side!”

  As people started to leave, Sherrena and Lora found a quiet spot in the hallway. “I got drama,” Sherrena began. “Drama for your momma! Me and Lamar Richards are going at it again—the man with no legs. He shorted me on my rent this month.”

  “How much?” Lora’s voice, with soft traces of the island accent, belonged to a librarian. She was older than Sherrena and that night was elegantly dressed in dark slacks, gold earrings, and a layered red blouse. She folded her fur-lined coat on her lap.

  “Thirty dollars.” Sherrena shrugged. “But that’s not it. It’s the principle….He already owes me two sixty for that bad job for the painting.”

  When Lamar and the boys had finished painting, he called Sherrena, and she came over. She noticed that the boys had not filled in the holes; had dripped white paint on the brown trim; had ignored the pantry. Lamar said Quentin had not dropped off hole-filler or brown paint. “You’re supposed to go and ask for it, then,” Sherrena snapped back. She refused to credit Lamar a cent toward his debt.

  “And then,” Sherrena continued, “he did his bathroom floor over without my knowledge and deducted thirty dollars out of the rent.” When painting, Lamar had found a box of tile in Patrice’s old place and had used it to retile his bathroom floor, securing each piece with leftover paint. “I told him, ‘Do not—do not ever deduct any more rent from me ever again!’ Plus, how can you deduct when you owe me?”