The day the Common Council was to decide the fate of the trailer park, Tobin Charney, dressed in a polo shirt, tan slacks, and brown loafers, sat in the middle of a front-row bench next to his wife and lawyer. Large pink marble columns stretched up toward a beamed ceiling with an intricate maroon-and-yellow pattern. A large oak desk rested in the front of the room, facing fifteen smaller oak desks assigned to each alderperson and spaced several feet apart. The night before, the lawyer had submitted an addendum to the council. It came in too late for most alders to read, so the lawyer stood and cleared his throat. The addendum, he informed the room, included ten steps Tobin would take in the immediate and near future. He would enroll in a daylong landlord training class offered by the city, hire a twenty-four-hour security service and an independent management company, evict nuisance tenants, and address the property-code violations. He would not retaliate against tenants who spoke out against him. And he would sell the trailer park within a year.
“The people in this park are vulnerable: elderly, disabled, children,” the lawyer concluded, noting that Tobin had “worked diligently” with Alderman Witkowski to “draw up the terms of the agreement.”
The Common Council was not happy with this midnight deal, and they argued with one another as sunlight beamed through the chamber’s stained-glass windows. One alderman called it a “gentleman’s agreement.” Another asked if all citizens, when called to account, could simply produce a ten-point plan. Finally, Alderman Witkowski rose to speak.
“Mr. Charney has allowed a good mobile home park to move to something like this,” he began. “I have four mobile home parks in my district, and this is the only one with these types of problems.” He looked over his glasses at the lawyer. “They aren’t all elderly, disabled, and children, sir. But”—he turned back to his colleagues—“there are people with limited means and limited abilities. They would be forced to move out.” Witkowski was no friend of Tobin’s, but he was satisfied with the terms of the addendum.
The debate rose up again, energetic and sharp. Tobin remained seated in the back, holding his wife’s hand and looking annoyed.
The president called for a vote.
After the hearing, Tobin drove to the trailer park. He did not call everyone together to announce the resolution. He did not slide into a chair in the office and let out a sigh. He began evictions. The council had agreed to let Tobin keep his license only if he took drastic steps to improve the park, including forcing the troublemakers out.
When city or state officials pressured landlords—by ordering them to hire an outside security firm or by having a building inspector scrutinize their property—landlords often passed the pressure on to their tenants.1 There was also the matter of reestablishing control. The most effective way to assert, or reassert, ownership of land was to force people from it.2
“Where did my twenty-eight-day notices go?” Lenny asked. He was in the office searching through piles of papers. With a twenty-eight-day “no cause” termination notice, landlords did not need to provide a reason for the eviction. It was an ideal way to remove nuisance tenants who were current on their rent. Turning to Tobin, he said, “You got a lot of twenty-eight-day notices to fill out.”
“They owe me back rent,” Tobin replied. “Give them a five-day.”
“They,” in this case, meant Pam and her family. After driving Pam to eviction court, Tobin had asked her to talk to the newspeople. She was thirty years old and seven months pregnant, with a midwestern twang and a face cut from a high school yearbook photo. She made for a sympathetic case. But now Tobin was cleaning house.
Tobin looked up. “Lenny, I hope the money isn’t coming in slow because of this,” he said.
“It’s not, surprisingly,” Lenny replied. “I just filled out my spreadsheets, and we’re looking good.”
Office Susie added, “I had a beautiful collection.”
Pam tried changing Tobin’s mind by signing over the $1,200 check she had just received as part of Obama’s economic stimulus act. She thought it would be enough, mainly because she thought she owed $1,800. But Tobin said she owed something more like $3,000, and Office Susie told him Pam smoked crack. Tobin accepted Pam’s stimulus check but moved forward with the eviction anyway. Pam’s family had lived in the trailer park for two years.
Pam and her boyfriend, Ned Kroll, ended up in one of Tobin’s trailers because he gave it to them. Pam and Ned had been considering moving to Milwaukee from Green Bay to be closer to Pam’s ailing father when they spotted an ad Tobin had taken out in the local paper. They drove down to have a look.
When Pam and Ned arrived at College Mobile Home Park, Tobin and Lenny offered them the “Handyman Special,” a free mobile home. Under this arrangement, tenants owned the trailers, and Tobin owned the ground underneath them. He charged the owners “lot rent,” which was equivalent to what his renters paid. But unlike the renters, families who owned their trailers were responsible for upkeep. In theory, a family could at any time move their trailer elsewhere. But the owners knew that in practice this was impossible. Towing expenses exceed $1,500 and setting up the trailer somewhere else could cost double that. When owners were evicted and inevitably left their trailer behind, Tobin would reclaim it as “abandoned property” and give it to someone else.
At the time that Pam was facing eviction, all but twenty trailers in the park were owner-occupied. The only benefit to owning your trailer was psychological. “I moved here so I can own a home, even if it’s on wheels,” one of Pam’s neighbors liked to say.3
Tobin’s mobile-home giveaways sped things up—he could fill recently vacated trailers, sometimes even junk trailers, in weeks if not days—but hard-up families found the trailer park on their own too.
In Milwaukee and cities across the country, as affordable rental stock has been allowed to deteriorate and eventually disappear, low-income families have rushed to occupy cheap units. Nationwide, vacancy rates for low-cost units have fallen to single digits.4 Lenny’s office phone rang daily with people inquiring about availability. The phone rang before the newspeople came, and it rang after they left. The month the story aired, the trailer park had zero vacancies. “The park is filled up,” Lenny said with a chuckle. “And we still got people calling.” The rent rolls that Lenny kept for Tobin showed that in an average month only five trailers sat vacant, which would put Tobin’s vacancy rate below 4 percent.5 The high demand for the cheapest housing told landlords that for every family in a unit there were scores behind them ready to take their place. In such an environment, the incentive to lower the rent, forgive a late payment, or spruce up your property was extremely low.
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“Figures,” Ned had mumbled past a dangling cigarette when he found out Pam was pregnant with another daughter. He had made a son once, when he was sixteen, with a Mexican girl he’d met at a ZZ Top concert. But the girl’s family blotted him out, and Ned hardly thought about that boy anymore unless “La Grange” came on the radio. “After that, maybe I got punished,” he once mused. “No more boys.” The new one would make five daughters if you counted Pam’s two black girls, which Ned sometimes did.
Pam and Ned had met in Green Bay, after Pam’s father asked Ned to tune up his Harley. Ned was ten years older than Pam, with grease under his fingernails, brown stubble, and long hair, balding in the front. He was the kind of man who took satisfaction in leaving the bathroom door open and scratching himself in public.
Pam already had two daughters: Bliss, born when Pam was twenty-three, and Sandra two years after that. Their father, a black man, was a drug dealer whom Pam had met when she was nineteen. Pam later learned that she was one of several girlfriends.
“Tell about the time that Dad hit you with a bottle and blood was coming out of your head,” Sandra once asked her mother as they drove to a food pantry. She was six when she said this.
Pam forced a sad smile. “You weren’t old enough to remember that.”
“Yes, I was,” replied Sandra. Sandra was the one who would squash a cockroach with a loose shoe while the other girls shuddered and clung to one another. She and Bliss were the only black children in the trailer park. Once, one of their neighbors hung a Nazi flag in his front window. Lenny didn’t permit that, but he was okay with the Confederate flag as long as it was displayed underneath Old Glory.