Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,10
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.”