Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,23

even more true afterward.

Arleen had given up hoping for housing assistance long ago. If she had a housing voucher or a key to a public housing unit, she would spend only 30 percent of her income on rent. It would mean the difference between stable poverty and grinding poverty, the difference between planting roots in a community and being batted from one place to another. It would mean she could give most of her check to her children instead of her landlord.

Years ago, when she was nineteen, Arleen rented a subsidized apartment for $137 a month. She had just had Ger-Ger and was grateful to be out of her mother’s house. She could make her own decisions. So when a friend asked Arleen to give up her place and move in with her, Arleen decided to say yes. She walked away from a subsidized apartment and into the private rental market, where she would stay for the next twenty years. “I thought it was okay to move somewhere else,” she remembered. “And I regret it, right now to this day. Young!” She shook her head at her nineteen-year-old self. “If I would’ve been in my right mind, I could have still been there.”

One day on a whim, Arleen stopped by the Housing Authority and asked about the List. A woman behind the glass told her, “The List is frozen.” On it were over 3,500 families who had applied for rent assistance four years earlier. Arleen nodded and left with hands in her pockets.2 It could have been worse. In larger cities like Washington, DC, the wait for public housing was counted in decades. In those cities, a mother of a young child who put her name on the List might be a grandmother by the time her application was reviewed.3

Most poor people in America were like Arleen: they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.4

If Arleen wanted public housing, she would have to save a month’s worth of income to repay the Housing Authority for leaving her subsidized apartment without giving notice; then wait two to three years until the List unfroze; then wait another two to five years until her application made it to the top of the pile; then pray to Jesus that the person with the stale coffee and heavy stamp reviewing her file would somehow overlook the eviction record she’d collected while trying to make ends meet in the private housing market on a welfare check.

—

The upstairs unit on Thirteenth Street didn’t sit vacant for long. Sherrena moved a young woman into the apartment soon after the paint had dried on Arleen’s walls. Trisha was her name.

Arleen and Trisha began talking and sharing meals. Arleen could be quiet and cautious around new people, guarded, but Trisha was an open book. She told Arleen that this was her first real home in eight years. Her last real home belonged to her sister, who had asked her to leave after Trisha told her what their father had done to her. Trisha then started sleeping in shelters and abandoned houses, but mostly she went home with men. At sixteen, she learned to use her skinny frame, her flush of wavy black hair, her copper skin, a mix of black, Mexican, and white blood. The year before, when she was twenty-three, Trisha had had a baby but signed him over to her sister because she was using. Crack, mostly. After the baby came, Trisha found Repairers of the Breach, a local homeless outreach that helped her get on SSI.

Trisha was illiterate and fragile. Jori once reduced her to tears by asking, “You special or something?” But she was also laid-back and sweet. Most of all, she was there. When Arleen and Trisha wanted a smoke to stave off boredom or, at the end of the month, hunger, Trisha used spare change to buy loose cigarettes at the corner store or fished stubs from standing ashtrays outside of fast-food joints. When Arleen needed to run an errand, Trisha would watch the boys, and Jori, who saw Trisha as an equal or a lesser, but certainly not as an adult, would tell her to watch her mouth around Jafaris. “I was born to be cussing,” Trisha would reply.

One day, Arleen and Trisha watched a U-Haul truck pull up. Three women and a man walked up to the apartment and gave Arleen’s door a knock. Sensing who they were,