Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,6

black neighborhood off Capitol Drive. The house had a finished basement with an inset Jacuzzi tub. Sherrena and Quentin had furnished it with beige leather furniture, large brass and crystal light fixtures, and gold-colored curtains. The kitchen was spacious and unused, since they ate out most days. Typically the only things in the refrigerator were restaurant doggie bags.

“Huh?” Quentin called back, coming down the stairs.

“The girl downstairs at Thirteenth Street? Her momma done called the building inspector….Her mother was outside talking shit!”

Quentin listened to the story and said, “Put her out.”

Sherrena thought about it for a moment, then agreed. She reached in a drawer and began filling out a five-day eviction notice. The law forbade landlords from retaliating against tenants who contacted DNS. But landlords could at any time evict tenants for being behind on rent or for other violations.

By the time Quentin and Sherrena pulled the Suburban onto Thirteenth Street, night had fallen. The apartment door was open. Sherrena walked right through it without knocking and handed the young tenant an eviction notice, saying, “Here. I hope you get some assistance.”

A man followed Sherrena out the door and stood on the unlit porch. “Excuse me,” he called out as Sherrena met Quentin in the street. “You’re evicting her?”

“She told me she wanted to move, so that let me know she wasn’t going to pay anything else,” Sherrena answered.

“She told you she wanted the windows fixed.”

Quentin interjected, looking at Sherrena, “He ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.”

“I got everything to do with it, blood. This my stepdaughter here!”

“You don’t even stay here though, man!” Quentin yelled back.

“Ain’t nobody want to live like that….Fuck you mean, I don’t have nothing to do with it?”

Quentin opened the Suburban’s door and pulled out his security belt, equipped with handcuffs, a small baton, and a canister of Mace the size of a small fire extinguisher. Quentin had been here before. There was the tenant who told him he was going to take his security deposit out of Quentin’s pocket. There was the one who said he was going to shoot him in the face.

The tenant’s mother joined the stepfather on the dark porch. “Are you evicting her?” she asked.

“She didn’t pay her rent,” Sherrena said. “Do y’all have her rent to pay?”

“I don’t give a shit, man,” the stepfather was saying almost to himself. What he didn’t give a shit about wasn’t the eviction but whatever was going to transpire there, at that very moment, on that dark street.

“I don’t either!” Quentin shot back.

“I’ll whip that motherfuckin’ ass, nigga….Don’t say I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.”

“You don’t!” Sherrena yelled as Quentin tugged her back to the Suburban. “You don’t!”

Days after the tenant left, Sherrena took a call from a caseworker at Wraparound, a local social services agency. The caseworker had a client who needed a place to live with her two boys. Wraparound would pay her security deposit and first month’s rent, which sounded good to Sherrena. The new tenant’s name was Arleen Belle.

2.

MAKING RENT

Sometime after Sherrena paid him a visit with her eviction notice, Lamar was back in his apartment on Eighteenth and Wright, playing spades with his two sons and their friends. As always, they sat around a small kitchen table, slapping the playing cards hard on the wood or sending them spinning with a calm flick of the wrist. The neighborhood boys knew they could show up at Lamar’s place day or night for a bite to eat, a drag off a blunt if they were lucky, and a romping game of spades.

“You ain’t got no more spades, Negro?”

“Look, we gonna set they ass.”

Lamar was partnered with Buck. At eighteen, Buck was the oldest of the crew and went by Big Bro. They sat across from each other, playing Luke, Lamar’s sixteen-year-old son, and DeMarcus, one of Luke’s closest friends. Eddy, Lamar’s younger son at fifteen, worked the stereo while four other neighborhood boys stood around, waiting their turn at spades. Lamar sat in his wheelchair. His prosthetic legs, each one foot to top-shin, stood beside his bed, casting a humanlike shadow on the rough wood floor.

“Police crazy,” Buck offered, inspecting his hand. He was finishing high school and working part-time in its cafeteria, where he had to wear a hairnet to cover his thick cornrows. Buck slept at his parents’ house but lived at Lamar’s. If someone asked him why, he would study his size twelve boots and just say, “ ’Cause.” The boys usually walked to the