Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Larraine is still living with Beaker. She must make two trips to the welfare office to again receive $80 worth of food stamps each month. After the second visit, she goes to a furniture store to look at armoires and TVs to put on layaway. Larraine considers layaway a way to save money as she can’t have too much money in a bank account or her benefits will be reduced. While she doesn’t put anything on layaway that day, later she does spend all $80 of food stamps on one meal—lobster tails, shrimp, king crab legs, salad, and a lemon meringue pie—to celebrate her and her dead boyfriend Glen’s anniversary. 

The way Larraine spends money makes no sense to her family. If only she’d be more sensible, they think, she wouldn’t be so destitute. Desmond posits, however, it’s not these spending habits which make her poor. Instead, she spends money for things on layaway and giant meals because she’s poor. That is, even if she scrimped and saved every dime and cut every financial corner possible, the most she would be able to accumulate is a few hundred dollars a year. He writes:

The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to live in color, to season the suffering with pleasure (219).

Beaker tells Larraine he is moving to a federally-subsidized, assisted-living facility and moves out the next morning. By now, in the middle of winter, the heat, hot water, phone, and cable have been cut off due to Beaker being behind on bills. Larraine discovers he hasn’t been paying his lot rental fee, either. Larraine can’t pay this back rent because most of her money goes to Eagle Storage, where her belongings remain after being evicted from her trailer. Up to this point, she’s paid over $1,000 in storage fees. Beaker gives the trailer to the trailer park management company to make up what he owes them. Larraine has until the end of the month to find another place to live. She calls about or applies to forty different apartments with no luck. At the last second, Larraine moves in with another trailer park resident, Ms. Betty, who says Larraine can stay with her for $100 a month until winter is over.

After being evicted from the trailer park, Pam, Ned, and the four girls stay at a cheap motel for a few days. The three older girls go to stay with a family friend while Pam, Ned, and Kristin move in with Travis, a friend of Ned’s. By now, Ned has lost his job due to the two days he took off when they were evicted and trying to find a place to stay; however, he does pick up a part-time job working on motorcycles. Travis eventually tells them to leave, and after moving to a cheap motel, Pam gives birth to another daughter.

Pam looks at so many places to rent she loses count. Between her drug conviction, Ned having a warrant out for him, no proof of income, and their eviction record, it proves almost impossible to find a place. The thing that is the biggest hindrance is probably their four daughters. Children have long been discriminated against—they’re loud, break things, can cause CHS to show up, and can get lead poisoning—so in the past, many landlords refused to rent to families or, if they did, charged extra rent and surcharges. In 1988, Congress outlawed housing discrimination against families and children, but it nonetheless persists to this day.

Ned finds them a place to live—he lies and says he is a single dad—but life doesn’t become much better. Ned makes Pam’s two half-black daughters march around chanting “White power!” (239). Pam hopes it won’t hurt them in the long run: “She prayed for forgiveness, for being a failure of a mother. But she felt circumstances bound her to Ned. ‘We aren’t doing crack, but we are still dealing with the same fucking shit […] I’ve never been in a position to leave’” (239). The best she can do is tell her daughters Ned is the devil.

Arleen and her boys are staying at a shelter. She’s looked at or applied to eighty-two apartments without any luck. She lies about her past, lies about her sons being in childcare, and lies about receiving child support. Nothing works. Arleen even goes to see one of her older children, Boosie, a crack dealer, and makes an appointment to see the apartment for rent below his.

Arleen and her sons go by their old place on Thirteenth Street, and her sons play with Little, the cat that had to be left behind. Arleen tells Jafaris to put the cat down and pulls at his arm: “When Arleen was alone, she sometimes cried for Little. But she was teaching her sons to love small, to reject what they could not have” (240). Arleen does the best she can for her sons, but she can’t say over and over she’s sorry for not giving them what they want. So, sometimes she tells them they are bad or selfish or weak for wanting new shoes, hair products, or snack food. They walk back to the shelter after looking at another apartment they won’t get. Arleen and the boys can stay at the shelter for only twenty-nine more days.

After being evicted from her apartment on Thirteenth Street, Crystal moves to the homeless shelter known as the Lodge. She quickly makes a new friend there, Vanetta Evans, who has three children. The two women decide to find a place together. Vanetta is waiting to be sentenced on a robbery charge—she could be fined up to a hundred thousand dollars, spend forty years in prison, or both—but she’s hoping for probation, as it’s her first offense. Vanetta and some friends robbed two women after her hours were cut at her job, her electricity was shut off, and she was about to be evicted from her apartment. Crystal tells her, “Prayer is a powerful thing” (244). Vanetta doesn’t have any faith in Jesus and is annoyed by how much time and money Crystal donates to her church each week.

Crystal and Vanetta look at over thirty apartments without finding anyone willing to rent to them. They want to be on the South Side, away from the North Side’s crime and violence, but that doesn’t seem possible. Even though they can’t meet any of the six criteria required at a low-income rental service such as no evictions in the past three years and no violent crime convictions in the last seven years, they put in an application anyway. A few days later their application is summarily rejected. Even as they begin looking at places closer and closer to the North Side, they don’t find anything.

After a fight with a maintenance man and missing a job-training session, Crystal is told to leave the Lodge. She spends the day looking for a place to stay, but with no luck. Finally, she calls her pastor, who finds an old couple who let her sleep on a recliner in their living room. The next night, after church, Crystal returns to the house. The husband cracks the door open and hands her a bag containing her belongings. Cold, icy rain is falling in heavy sheets of water. She begins calling people to find somewhere to go, but, once more, with no luck.