Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,45

of their company—Eagle Moving and Storage—and various clever slogans: “Moving’s for the Birds,” “Service with a Grunt,” “Order Some Carryout.”

The Brittain brothers—Tom, Dave, and Jim—had taken over the company from their father. When he had started it back in 1958, there were only one or two eviction moves a week. He ran a two-truck operation out of his home and would pick up men from the rescue mission when he needed an extra hand. Fifty years later, the company employed thirty-five people, most of them full-time movers; owned a fleet of vans and eighteen-foot trucks; and operated out of a three-story, 108,000-square-foot building that had originally held a furniture factory. Forty percent of their business came from eviction moves.

Eagle’s moving crew worked with two sheriff deputies. The deputies would knock on the door to announce the eviction; the movers would follow, clearing out the home. Landlords footed the bill. Before a landlord could activate the Sheriff’s Office, he had to contract with a bonded moving company. There were four such companies in Milwaukee, Eagle being the largest. To hire one of Eagle’s five-man crews, a landlord had to put down a $350 deposit, the average cost of an eviction job. Eagle then handed over a Letter of Authority, which the landlord would take to the Sheriff’s Office, along with the necessary court documents and an additional $130 sheriff’s fee. The sheriff had ten days to remove the tenants. A formal eviction that involved sheriffs and movers could run around $600, when you included the court filing charge and process-server fee. Landlords could add these costs to a judgment but often never got them back.

Dave Brittain, a white man with graying hair and a long stride, gave the men the signal, and they climbed into the trucks. Tim drove the van, and when Dave went out on moves, he sat in the passenger’s seat.

The daily eviction route began with the northernmost address and pushed south. Eagle’s trucks would lumber through the North Side ghetto in the morning and early afternoon. Then they would cross the Menominee River Valley and course through the predominantly Hispanic streets of the near South Side before ending their day in the trailer parks on the white far South Side.

The sheriffs met the moving crew outside an apartment complex on Silver Spring Drive. John, the older of the two deputies and the one who most looked the part—broad shoulders, thick jowls, sunglasses, cop mustache, gum—gave the door a knock. A small black woman answered, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. When John looked around and saw a tidy house with dishes drying in the rack and not a box packed, he turned to his partner and asked, “Are we in the right house?” He placed a call back to the office.

When Sheriff John walked into a house and saw mattresses on the floor, grease on the ceiling, cockroaches on the walls, and clothes, hair extensions, and toys scattered about, he didn’t double-check. Sometimes tenants had already abandoned the place, leaving behind dead animals and rotting food. Sometimes the movers puked. “The first rule of evictions,” Sheriff John liked to say, “is never open the fridge.” When things were especially bad, when an apartment was covered in trash or dog shit, or when one of the guys would find a needle, Dave would nod and say, “Junk in,” leaving the mess for the landlord.

John hung up the phone and waved the movers in. At that moment, the house no longer belonged to the occupants, and the movers took it over. Grabbing dollies, hump straps, and boxes, the men began clearing every room. They worked quickly and without hesitation. There were no children in the house that morning, but there were toys and diapers. The woman who answered the door moved slowly, looking overcome. A sob broke through her blank face when she opened the refrigerator and saw that the movers had cleaned it out, even packing the ice trays.2 She found her things piled in the back alley. Sheriff John looked to the sky as it began to rain and then looked back at Tim. “Snowstorm. Rainstorm. We don’t give a shit,” Tim said, lighting a Salem.

No one was home for the next eviction, a two-story baby-blue house. Half the time, the tenants weren’t home. Some moved out before the sheriffs arrived. Others didn’t realize their day had come. A rarefied bunch called the Sheriff’s Office, asking if their address was on that day’s eviction list. But