"For the chronically and desperately poor whose credit was already wrecked, a docketed judgment was just another shove deeper into the pit," Desmond wrote. "But for the tenant who went on to land a decent job or marry and then take another tentative step forward, applying for student loans or purchasing a first home -- for that tenant, it was a real barrier on the already difficult road to self-reliance and security."
Corporations such as Rent Recovery Service are hired by landlords to hound evicted tenants for their debts. These corporations monitor tenants' financial lives for years without their knowledge. They never close an unpaid file, waiting patiently for someone to become financially solvent to strike. Those few who begin to recover financially are forced to pay ancient debts, swelled by high interest rates, and pushed swiftly back into economic distress.
Desmond profiled Tobin Charney, who made close to half a million a year running College Mobile Home Park, with its dilapidated 131 trailers and leaking raw sewage. Charney seized the trailers of those he evicted as "abandoned property" and rented or sold them to someone else. Larraine Jenkins, one of his tenants Desmond followed, was paying Charney 77 percent of her income until she was evicted.
"She knew the ghetto's value and how money could be made from a property that looked worthless to people who didn't know any better," Desmond wrote of a slumlord named Sherrena Tarver, who made about $10,000 a month from her dozens of rental properties. She earned more in a month than most of her tenants earned in a year. And like many slumlords, "her worst properties yielded her biggest returns."
A life of dead ends led many in Desmond's book to make decisions that, on the outside, could be seen as irresponsible or foolish: withholding rent payments, or as Larraine Jenkins did, blowing her monthly allocation of food stamps on a dinner of lobster tails, shrimp, crab, lemon meringue pie and Pepsi. But the present is unbearable, and the future, they know, is grim. So they block the future out and seek, for a moment, to make the present endurable. It is why so many of the poor turn to drugs or alcohol. Jenkins, as Desmond wrote, was not "poor because she threw money away." She "threw money away because she was poor."
"People like Larraine [Jenkins] lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty," Desmond wrote. "The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those on the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they choose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They might buy lobster on food stamps."
The powerlessness of poverty evokes a protective emotional callousness that diminishes or blunts the capacity for empathy and feelings of self-worth. Arleen Belle, who battles depression and lives on welfare, struggles to raise a teenage boy, Jori, and his 5-year-old brother, Jafaris, who has severe asthma. The book opens with Jori and his cousin throwing snowballs at cars on Milwaukee's South Side. An angry driver stops his vehicle, chases the boys to their apartment and kicks down the front door. The family is evicted because of the incident and moves to a homeless shelter. They had lived in the apartment for eight months. Jori was forced to change schools five times in the seventh and eighth grades because of repeated moves. Later in the book, after Jori kicks a teacher in the shin, the police show up at the door and the family, which had just moved into the apartment after a lengthy and exhausting search, is given a week to leave. The string of evictions and length of the waiting list -- 3,500 names -- means Belle and her boys will never receive housing assistance. Three-quarters of families that qualify for housing assistance nationally never obtain it.
Several of those in the book, including Scott, a gay nurse who loses his license after he becomes addicted to opiates, were sexually abused. Most of those Desmond interviewed grew up in violent households or suffered domestic abuse from partners. Nearly all of the fathers were in prison or had disappeared.
Poverty robs children of their childhood. Jori, at 14, attempted to be his mother's protector. "If Arleen needed to smile, Jori would steal for her," Desmond wrote. "If she was disrespected, he would fight for her. Some kids born into poverty set their sights on doing whatever it takes to get out. Jori wasn't going anywhere, sensing he was put on this Earth to look after Arleen and Jafaris. He was, all 14 years of him, the man of the house." He tells his mother he wants to become a carpenter so he can build her a house.
Belle's family ends up living with Crystal Mayberry, who was 18 and had an IQ of about 70, and who had been "born prematurely on a spring day in 1990 shortly after her pregnant mother was stabbed eleven times in the back during a robbery." The stabbing induced labor. Crystal, the daughter of parents addicted to crack, grew up in 25 foster homes. When she aged out of the system, she became homeless.
Belle and Mayberry engaged, Desmond wrote, in "a popular strategy poor people used to pay the bills and feed their children. Especially in the inner city, strangers brushed up against one another constantly -- on the street, at job centers, in the welfare building -- and found ways to ask for and offer help. Before she met Arleen, Crystal stayed a month with a woman she had met on a bus."
But the relationship soured, in part because of tensions between Jori and Mayberry. Jori threatened Mayberry and called her a "b*tch" when she attempted to put his little brother outside of the house with no shoes or coat.
"You don't know what it's like," Belle shouted at Mayberry as the relationship unraveled. "You don't know what I been through. You don't know what it's like to have your father molest you and your mother not care about it!"
"Oh, yes I do," Mayberry, answered. "Yes, I do! I know exactly what that's like 'cause my stepfather molested me when I was just a little girl, and that's why they sent me to foster care."
The world is too much for Jori, as it is for his mother and little brother, as it is for most of the poor who are hemmed in by the unforgiving walls of poverty. After their eviction, Jori leaves his black and white cat, Little, with a neighbor. When he comes back to collect Little, one of his few sources of joy, Jori finds "a car had ground him into the pavement." He fights back tears. He takes a foam mannequin's head, turns it face up and begins to repeatedly hit the face with his fist until his mother screams at him to stop. By the end of the book, Belle loses her two children to Child Protective Services.
Desmond captures the stress and shame that makes it difficult to have empathy and that creates disconnected and alienated individuals. He wrote:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
4
4
4
