Who earns the poor?"Drawing profits from the poorest trailer square in the city requires talent"

College Square*

Lenny Lawson left his office in the trailer park to burn down the pall mall. Cigarette smoke rose above his mustache, past his pale blue eyes, and disappeared somewhere above his baseball cap. Lenny looked over the rooftops of the rows of trailers stacked close together on a narrow strip of asphalt. Almost all the trailers were parallel, a few paces apart. There was an airport not far away - even the square's long-time residents looked up as the planes flashing from the underside of their hulls flew low, making the window panes tremble. Lenny had lived here since he was born, forty-three years, and for the last twelve he had been the steward.

He knew that junkies lived mainly in the north part of the square, and those who worked double shifts in restaurants or nursing homes, mostly in the south. Scrap dealers and can collectors stayed close to the plaza's entrance, and those with the best jobs - sandblasters, mechanics - congregated in the snobbish back office area, where the trailers always had swept steps and pots of flowers in front of them. You could find someone on welfare everywhere, as well as the old ones who, as one resident of the square put it, "went to bed with the chickens and got up with the chickens." Lenny tried to keep sex offenders around junkies, but he didn't always succeed. He had to locate one next to the two shifts. Fortunately, the guy never left the trailer or even opened the blinds. Someone provided him with food and other necessities every week. (...)

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The College Trailer Yard is located on the outskirts of the South Side, on Sixth Street, near the intersection with College Avenue. On one side there are sand pits, overgrown with overgrown trees and bushes, on the other side there is the yard of a large truck dealer. You have to walk fifteen minutes to the nearest gas station or fast food. There are also other trailer parks nearby, surrounded by streets lined with modest light-brick houses with sharply sloping roofs. White poor people live in this part of Milwaukee. (...)

Lenny stubbed out his cigarette with his shoe and bent down so as not to bump against the door frame of the office located in the middle of the square, near the only entrance gate. It was a cramped, windowless room, cluttered with papers, lit by a bare bulb screwed into a socket on the ceiling. The old appliances - fax machine, calculator and computer - had greasy marks on their casings. In the summer, a wet stain spread across the thin purple carpet under the leaking air conditioner. In winter, an electric stove hummed softly, set on an upturned plastic bucket. Over the years, Lenny had added some embellishments to the decor: deer antlers, a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer plaque, a poster of a startled pheasant taking flight.

"Hey," he greeted Susie as he sat down behind his desk. (...) "Here's your unemployment benefit," Susie said to one of the letters. "Perhaps take some rent, huh?"

If grandma doesn't start paying, she won't stay here for long. He can move back to the South Side or live in the ghetto.

The door to the office opened, and Mrs. Mytes, a seventy-one-year-old woman who stood very straight and didn't look decrepit, strode in barefoot. Beneath a storm of cotton-white hair, her face was lined with wrinkles and not a single tooth.

"Hello, Grandma," Lenny said with a smile. Like everyone else in the square, he thought Mrs. Mytes was crazy.

- And you know what I did today? I threw one bill in the trash! Mrs. Mytes gave him a sideways look, her eyes set in a wrinkled face. She almost screamed the words.

- Hmm. Really? Lenny replied, looking at her.

- I'm not stupid!

- Hmm, yes. I can find more bills for you. You can pay mine.

- Ha!

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Ms. Mytes went outside to start another day of wandering around with a shopping cart and collecting cans. She paid her bills with her allowance. She sold the collected cans to give her mentally retarded adult daughter a few pennies for something good, and if she collected a lot of them, for a trip to fast food.

Lenny smiled and went back to his paperwork, waiting for the door to open again. People who were half-heard elsewhere were given Lenny's full attention. He was responsible for overseeing rent payments and reported repairs, vetting applicants for tenants, and handing out eviction notices. But it was also his job to listen to what was going on in the square so he knew everything: who was up to date and who was behind, who was pregnant, who liked to mix methadone with painkillers, whose boyfriend had just been released from prison. "Sometimes I'm a psychiatrist," he liked to joke, "and sometimes I'm the biggest jackass in the village."

Threat

The owner of the trailer park was one Tobin Charney. He lived more than a hundred miles from Milwaukee in Skokie, Illinois, but visited the plaza every day except Sundays. Susie was paying five dollars an hour and lowered her rent to $440. He took no rent from Lenny at all, and paid him an annual salary of thirty-six thousand in cash. Tobin had a reputation for flexibility and forbearance, but no one thought he was a loser. He was a tough guy with squinted eyes and an unsmiling face, brusque and energetic. He was seventy-one, the same age as Mrs. Mytes, and he exercised regularly, carrying a gym bag in the trunk of his Cadillac. He wasn't friends with the tenants, he didn't laugh at their jokes, he didn't ruffle the children's hair. He didn't pretend to be someone other than what he really was.

His father lived by renting apartments, at one point he had almost six hundred of them. All Tobin needed was this one address and one hundred and thirty-one trailers. However, in the last week of May 2008, it turned out that it could lose it all.

None of the five members of the Milwaukee Concession Commission agreed to renew his trailer park license. Leading the attack was Councilman Terry Witkowski, a longtime South Side resident with a pinkish face and silver hair. Witkowski emphasized that in the last two years, the Department of Municipal Services recorded seventy cases of violations of the construction law there. He mentioned that the police had been called to the square two hundred and sixty times in the last year alone. He claimed that the square had become a hotbed of drug trafficking, prostitution and violence. As he noted, the lack of a connection to the network recently caused a septic tank to burst and spill under ten trailers. The Concession Commission recognized the square in its current form as a "biological hazard to the environment". City, known in Milwaukee as "Borough Council". If the decision of the Concession Commission is upheld, Tobin will lose his source of income and his tenants - a roof over their heads.

The crisis of 2008 saw many families evicted from their homes. (Photo: Shutterstock)

At this point, the media came in with gel hair and shoulder-mounted cameras that looked like guns. They interviewed residents, including Tobin's outspoken critics.

"They're making us some dumb mutts in the media," Mary told Tina. They were talking next to the former's trailer.

"They said we were "a disgrace to the South Side," Tina replied.

Both had lived in the square for years, both had strong weathered faces.

"My son couldn't sleep because of it," Mary went on. - Same me and my husband... You know I'm doing two jobs. Working hard. And, truth be told, I can't afford to move anyway.

Mrs. Mytes came over and almost stuck her nose in Tina's nose. She took a step back.

- That son of a bitch! Mrs. Mytes began. - I'll call my councilman and let him hear! Oh, that son of a bitch...(.)

"And hearing that we're moving to the North Side isn't pleasant," she said. - It's not a joke.

She shivered a bit and looked away to keep from crying. And that was the crux of the matter, and that was what the people of the square feared the most. When Mary, Tina, Mrs. Mytes, and the entire square talked about having to move out, what they meant was that they might face having to move into a black ghetto. Susie was one of the few residents who happened to live on the North Side - her adult son had been mugged there by a guy with a gun.

- The councilor said it was a slum, like in a ghetto - she foamed. - Have you ever seen a ghetto?! The stress caused her stomach cramps so much that her son hid painkillers from her for fear she would overdose.

There are ten days left until the final vote on the fate of the trailer park. So the tenants held a barbecue for journalists, started calling local members of the state legislature, rehearsing the speeches they were going to give to the Borough Council. Dumpster Rufus, with a neatly trimmed red beard and vacant blue eyes, jotted down his thoughts and rehearsed his speech: "And then I'll ask, 'Who happened to be in arrears on five hundred dollars' rent?' And hands will go up. And then I can go on: 'Seven hundred? One thousand?' And everyone would raise their hand." Rufus wanted to end his speech with the words: "He's not a ghetto landlord. He's not a bad man."

Who profits from the poor?

If the speech didn't work and the plaza was to close, Rufus was going to get to the diax trailers, at least he'd make some money selling aluminum.

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"Tobinacja"

Tobin didn't go camping with the tenants. He agreed to pay piece by piece. When they lost their jobs, he let some people make up their rent. He used to say to Lenny, "They may not pay on time, but they're good people." He lent money to one lodger so she could go to her mother's funeral. When the police arrested the drunks who worked mowing the grass and collecting garbage in the square, Tobin paid bail for them.

It was rare for Tobin's negotiations with this or that tenant to be written down, so sometimes Tobin remembered one thing and they remembered another. The lodger said she owed him a hundred and fifty dollars, he said she owed him two hundred fifty or six hundred. Once Tobin forgot that one of the tenants had paid him a year in advance after he won compensation for an accident at work in court.

The inhabitants of the square had a short term for it: "tobination". Most often they put it down to his age or distraction, though Tobin's distraction only worked one way. Profiting from the poorest trailer park in the city required a certain talent, a specific initiative. Tobin was using a simple strategy. He would approach a drug addict, a scrap metal junkie or a disabled grandmother and say: "Give me my money". He pounded on the door until the tenant opened it. The fact that someone was in the trailer was basically impossible to hide. There wasn't much to hide here. Susie knew when someone got their benefit check because she was the one who put the mail in the lockers. And Lenny knew who had enough money to buy cigarettes or beer or a new bike for the kid, but not enough to pay the rent.

When the tenant opened the door, Tobin would reach out and say, "Do you have something for me?" Sometimes he drummed for several minutes. Sometimes he walked around the trailer, pounding the aluminum panels with his hand. Sometimes he'd ask Lenny or another tenant to pound on the back door while he stormed the front. He called the tenants at their workplace, sometimes even talking to their supervisors. If he was called by social workers or priests saying "Please" or "Wait a minute," he would simply reply, "Pay my rent." Tobin wasn't going to forget anyone or spare hundreds or thousands of dollars he owed, he wouldn't agree to pay half what he was owed, and he wouldn't go below market rent for the trailer. When tenants started to pay late, he had three choices. He could let it go and watch his influence dwindle, start eviction proceedings, or start negotiations.

Output one - no output. Tobin was in this business to make a living, and if he was too lenient, he might go bankrupt. Yet neither did he evict the greater part of those who owed him money. Ejecting tenants and bringing in new ones also costs money. On average, forty of Tobin's tenants owed him arrears in any given month - nearly a third of the square's tenants. The average debt of such a tenant was three hundred and forty dollars.

And yet Tobin evicted only a handful of tenants each month. The landlord could be too soft or too hard, but the profits flowed to those who found a middle ground, opted for the third option, and Tobin's tenants were grateful, though not immediately.

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Eviction

(...) Soon a letter from the Milwaukee Sheriff's Office arrived in Larraine's P.O. Box. On a light yellow sheet was printed the following text:

These words terrified Larraine. Fifty-four years old, she lived alone in a clean white trailer, though she prayed that one day she would live with her two adult daughters and granddaughter, who were at the center of her universe next to God. (...)

Smelling of sweat and vinegar, her brown hair tousled, Larraine walked into the office, yellow magazine crumpled in her hands like a dishcloth. After a brief exchange, Tobin led her outside and called Susie.

- Susie, Susie! he gave.

- What's up, Tobin?

- You'd take her to the bank, wouldn't you? He'll get some money for the rent.

"Come on then," Susie said, walking briskly toward the car.

When Susie and Larraine returned, Tobin was sitting in the office going through some papers.

- How much? he asked Susie.

"I have four hundred," Larraine replied.

"I'm not canceling the eviction," Tobin said, still looking at Susie. Larraine still owed him $150 for that month.

Larraine just stood silently. Tobin turned to her.

- When will you tell me the last one hundred and fifty?

- In the evening, okay...

Tobin interrupted her:

- Okay. Give it to Susie or Lenny.

But Larraine didn't have that money. She used the $150 of what she had for rent to pay her outstanding utility bill, hoping to get her gas back on. She wanted to take a hot shower, wash off the stench. She wanted to feel clean, maybe even a little pretty again, as she used to be when she danced on tables for men when her daughters were little. She longed for the hot water to soothe her fibromyalgic pains, a feeling she likened to a "million knives" stabbed in the back. She had prescriptions for lyrica, celebrex, but she didn't always have enough money to buy them, despite the insurance premium. Hot water would help. However, one hundred and fifty dollars was not enough. We Energies took the money, but they didn't connect the gas. Larraine felt like a moron for paying them.

Susie wrote the receipt on the first piece of paper she came across and tacked it to Larraine's eviction notice.

"You should go to your sister and ask her to lend you the change," she suggested, picking up the fax machine and dialing a number she knew by heart.

- Yes? Hello? I want to report a halt to the eviction from the College Trailer Yard," she told the Sheriff's Office employee. - This is Larraine Jenkins, trailer number W46. She paid the rent.

Susie canceled the visit of the sheriff's men, but Tobin could bring them back at any time if Larraine didn't pay what she owed.

Larraine returned to the trailer in a sour mood. It was so hot inside that she suspected that even the shower would have lukewarm water. She didn't turn on the fan, the fans only made her dizzy. She didn't open the window. She was just sitting on the couch. She called a couple of local loan companies. After several failed attempts, blankly staring at the floor, she announced:

- I can't think of anything else.

She lay down on the couch, trying to ignore the heat, and fell asleep.

Matthew Desmond's book was published by Marginesy Publishing House (press materials)

*Excerpt from the book "The Evicted" by Matthew Desmond translated by Tomasz S. Gałązka. You can buy it at Publio.pl >>>

Matthew Desmond - Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. Author of four books. For Evicted, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 and over a dozen of the most important awards for outstanding achievements in the field of non-fiction. He is the principal investigator for the eviction group The Eviction Lab. His research focuses on issues of poverty, urban living, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality and ethnography. He received the MacArthur Foundation's Geniuses Scholarship and is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine. In 2016, he was included in the Politico 50 list as one of the fifty people with the greatest influence on the political debate in the USA.