Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“He’s a player, that’s all he is. Time for him to go […] They just try to take, take, take, take, take.” 

This is what Lora, Sherrena’s friend who’s also a landlord, thinks about Lamar Richards, Sherrena’s tenant. Lamar has no legs below his knees and has been crawling around on the floor painting an apartment for Sherrena, in order to catch up on his rent, but the women see him as they see virtually all renters: impediments to collecting the money they so richly deserve

“Sometimes I’m a shrink […] Sometimes I’m the village asshole.”

This is how Lenny characterizes his job as the onsite property manager at College Mobile Home Park. Lenny is not completely uncaring, but he has one goal in mind regarding his interactions with the trailer park residents: collecting enough rent each month to earn his bonuses. If that means listening to someone complain as the shortest means to that end, so be it, and if he must play hardball with the people who only respond to that, he is fine with that, too. 

“I’ve been helping this girl as much as possible because I want her to fill up my properties […] The rent comes directly from her every month. So that’s a damn good situation to be in.” 

Sherrena is talking about Belinda Hall, the designated payee for 230 SSI recipients who are unable to manage their own finances. Sherrena likes receiving her money first when tenants receive benefits, and those with SSI can be more easily manipulated than her average renters. One example of this is when she repairs the credit score of SSI recipients so they can buy overvalued property from her during the real estate bubble. Most of them subsequently lose their homes, though Sherrena could care less, as she’s already made her money off them.  

“If I give you a break, you give me a break.” 

This is one of the strategies Sherrena uses to gain the upper hand with tenants. If properties aren’t up to code but tenants are willing to move in anyway, she acts like she’ll owe them a favor. Instead, the opposite is true: Once tenants move in, she has no incentive or desire to do any necessary maintenance. Further, if tenants complain or call a building inspector or fall behind on rent, she evicts them immediately.

“The voices in the room went up in unison, a proud and powerful chorus: ‘This is my property. Myyyyy property!’” 

The trainer at the landlord management training session Tobin, Lenny, and Office Susie go to makes all the attendees say this together, in order to empower themselves. Once again, despite having every financial and legal advantage, landlords continually see themselves as victims, powerless in the face of tenants who only want to live rent free and destroy everything around them.

“It’s still not fair. Nobody does anything to these tenants. It’s always the landlord. This system is flawed […] But whatever. I’ll never see the money. These people are deadbeats.” 

A few days before Christmas, Sherrena is in court evicting as many tenants as she can before the end of the year. Most tenants don’t show up to these hearings, and the ones who do aren’t well-versed enough about the proceedings to navigate the legal system. (Public defenders are only provided for criminal cases.) On one hand, Sherrena has convinced herself she is helping people improve their lives. On the other hand, as this quote demonstrates, she has nothing but contempt for her tenants.

“Snowstorm. Rainstorm. We don’t give a shit.” 

Tim oversees one of Eagle Moving and Storage’s many crews that team up with deputies, when the deputies deliver eviction notices. They’ve seen it all as everyone whose home they go to is unprepared to leave right that second. People cry, people threaten, and, on occasion, people kill themselves. The only way to deal with this misery is for the men to aggressively harden themselves to it. This transformation makes them victims of the eviction process as well. 

“[N]o matter how much money it is, it’s money. And they will work, and they will work for low prices.” 

Sherrena’s cutthroat instincts extend beyond her tenants to her employees. She wants any necessary maintenance work done as cheaply as possible. If that means taking advantage of desperate family members and friends, she’s fine with that. Or, if they balk at what she’s offering to pay, she’ll threaten to replace them with “hypes,” the crack addicts referred to in the quote above, who will work for twenty-five dollars a day.

“The ‘hood is good. There’s a lot of money there.”

Most of the white landlords Sherrena knows don’t want to own or rent property in the predominantly black North Side because they think the inherent problems outweigh the financial returns. Sherrena’s figured out, however, it’s possible to charge poor people even more for the same rentals and services in that area in comparison to comparable white ones. As Desmond discusses in this chapter and elsewhere in the book, it’s expensive to be poor.

“But this is what comes when you lose your house. This is what comes.” 

The idea of house and home is a powerful one, and the lack of one means a lack of control over life. Here, Arleen is talking to her son, Jori, after yet another altercation with Crystal, the woman who took them in but is prone to wild and erratic mood swings. In addition, the quote displays the overarching resignation embedded in Arleen’s mindset: people who can’t keep their home should expect the worst to happen to them. 

“No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.” 

Desmond points out here and in several other places that poor tenants in the early twentieth century frequently banded together to oppose unfair housing practices. Today, this is no longer the case. Even the poor see poverty as a sign of individual and personal weakness in others, something to be despised, not to be overcome through collective action.  

“If a man hits you like that and you let him back in, you like it.” 

As a follow-up to the previous quote, this is Crystal’s judgment of Trisha, her upstairs neighbor who’s regularly beaten by her boyfriend. Part of her doesn’t want to see any woman beaten, and Crystal is eventually evicted for calling 911 too many times about Trisha’s domestic abuse. Another part of her, though, sees this abuse being possible only because at some level Trisha wants it to happen.

“The issues you got? Can’t nobody fix ‘em but God.”

Another part of Crystal’s worldview is the presence of an all-powerful God. Much like Larraine Warren, Crystal is an avid churchgoer, but there isn’t much, if any, evidence of a benevolent hand of God in their lives. In fact, as portrayed in the book, churches don’t provide much of a safety net for the poor. Instead, the pastors and parishioners there seem to be as judgmental as the rest of the people in these women’s lives

“Arleen is being real selfish. She doesn’t care about anybody else but her and her kids. She doesn’t care about me.”

While Tobin and Sherrena both treat their tenants poorly, Tobin is at least honest about it: he wants to extract as much money as he can for the least amount of overhead and spend his winters someplace warm. Sherrena, however, has an almost pathological blindness when it comes to viewing her relationship with tenants. Arleen is a single mom with no job and two young boys. Almost anyone would say, yes, that makes their life Arleen’s top priority. Sherrena continues to demand that she and the money she is owed be first in every renter’s list of priorities, not just because the money is owed but because these tenants should want to put Sherrena first.

“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.” 

One of the myths about poverty Desmond works to dispel is the idea poor people are poor because they can’t manage money. Larraine’s family constantly hammers her with this idea because she periodically spends money on big dinners and other frivolous items. As Desmond points out, however, even if she saved every dime and cut every corner, the money saved would be insignificant in the greater scheme of things. People aren’t poor, he says, because of these little luxuries. They buy these temporary escapes from the horror of their day-to-day lives because they’re poor.

“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.’” 

Throughout the book, people have an idea of “home” that means all their problems will be solved once they find one. The never-ending, frenetic search for a home can also be a way of coping with and/or ignoring more overarching personal issues. Once Pam and Ned find a home, she’s faced with the reality of her life: Ned is a drunken racist who demeans her half-black daughters and makes them march around saying “White power!” In contrast to Crystal’s belief women stay in abusive relationships because on some level they like it, Pam’s despair illustrates how women stay in these relationships because they feel trapped and have no other options.

“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.” 

When Arleen and her boys go by their old home on Thirteenth Street, she doesn’t want them to play with Little, their cat they left behind, who is outside. This is a coping mechanism she is instilling in them: don’t love things too much because they will certainly be lost sooner rather than later. As there are several families with children in the book, this is one of many places where Desmond shows the impact poverty has on kids as well as their parents. Perhaps a hard-hearted person can be forgiven for saying adults deserve what they get from bad decisions, but it’s impossible to say any of these children have earned the psychological trauma they must endure on an almost daily basis. 

“Prayer is a powerful thing.” 

Prayer may indeed be powerful, as Crystal insists here, but so is money. At this point, she and Vanetta are trying to find a home together; however, Vanetta sees Crystal’s ties to her church as hindering that process. The time Crystal spends there is time she could be helping Vanetta house hunt, and the money she donates would also help obtain a house. Crystal sees both her prayers at church and the money she gives to the church as being seeds that will one day grow to wonderful fruition. Vanetta is less concerned with some magical day in the distant future or the state of her immortal soul as opposed to the dismal reality they currently face every day. 

“The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house.” 

Desmond is referring here to “The Rathole,” the duplex the eight Hinkston family members rent from Sherrena, but it could apply equally well to all the tenants and rental properties in the book. As he says, the basis of self and psychological wellbeing comes from a well-maintained home, and without that, things fall apart. At the same time, rental property is a victim of these ongoing battles, as neither landlords nor tenants feel they should be the ones to provide the necessary maintenance to keep it livable. 

“Hands behind her back, Vanetta turned around, tears streaming down her cheeks. Kendal stared back, stone-faced, just like his momma had taught him.” 

Like Arleen is doing with her boys, Vanetta has taught her son Kendal to be stoic no matter what happens. These mothers are doing their best—despite the future long-lasting damage which may result—to teach their children to be prepared for anything and everything to be taken away from them: a beloved home, a favorite pet like Little, or, in the case of Vanetta, the parent a child depends on. 

“I can feel my body getting better […] but when you have years and years and years of not feeling anything from drinking and dope, then it kind of hits you.” 

Much like Pam’s horror when she settles into a new, permanent home with Ned, Scott must face the reality of his situation once he becomes sober. That is, while drug addiction is a serious problem unto itself, people commonly become drug addicts to escape other problems in their lives. It is a victory to become clean, but it also means the recovering addict is forced to deal with the problems that originally drove them to drugs.  

“And we’ll all be together, and be laughing. We be remembering stuff like this and be laughing at it.” 

This is Arleen’s dream at the end of the book, as she and her boys have landed in yet another apartment; in the future, all of them will live happily ever after. In neither of the last two sections of the book, however, do we learn any more about what happens to her and her family. Arleen appears to be a static figure: she continues to do the same things with the same unhappy results. Perhaps the best she can ever hope for is just to dream of a future where all their problems have been solved.

“This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering—by no American value is this situation justified.”

Democracy and capitalism are often seen as going hand in hand. Desmond posits, however, reducing the abuse the poor suffer is a higher priority than the accumulation of wealth. Therefore, at the end of the Epilogue, he ties this suffering to a lack of American values: it’s not just a bad thing, it goes against who we are as a nation.