When Arleen moved out at seventeen, she threw away the hand-me-down clothes her mother had made her wear to school. “Ding-dong,” her classmates would taunt when she walked past in recycled bell-bottoms. Arleen put rubber bands on the bottom of her jeans, but that only made the kids laugh harder. When she dropped out before finishing high school, her mother said nothing. “She didn’t care.”
Arleen moved in with a family that paid her to babysit their children. During that time, she met the man who would become the father of her eldest child, Gerald, whom she took to calling Ger-Ger. After Arleen discovered she was pregnant with Ger-Ger, her man got entangled with the law. “I didn’t know nothing about having a boyfriend in and out of jail all the time. So when I met somebody else,” during one of the times Ger-Ger’s father was locked up, “I just left him alone.”
That someone else was Larry. He was a lean man with calm eyes and a wide brow. Larry had taught himself how to be a mechanic and earned money fixing cars in a back alley. On paydays, he would take Arleen out for Chinese food, her favorite. She would read the long menu but order the same thing every time: sesame chicken. They were poor and in love, and soon Arleen was pregnant with another son. They named him after Larry but called him Boosie. Larry and Arleen had three more children after that, a daughter and two more sons, letting Arleen’s mother name their youngest. “Jori.” They liked it.
“Will you marry me?” Larry asked one day.
Arleen laughed. She thought he was joking and said no. “He wasn’t talking about no big marriage, wasn’t even talking about at the courthouse,” Arleen remembered. But he was not joking. When she realized this, Arleen dropped her smile and said she would have to think about it. What gave her pause was not Larry but his mother and sister. “They always thought they knew more…I was never good enough in they eyes.”
After that, Larry started running around. It crushed Arleen, but when he came back, she always held the door open. Until one day he didn’t come back. They had been together for seven years. This time, the other woman was someone Arleen considered a friend.
That happened years ago. Sometimes, Larry parked outside of where Arleen was staying. She’d climb in his van, and they’d drive around and talk, mostly about Jori. From time to time, Larry took Jori to church or let him spend the night or swelled his lip for getting in trouble at school. When Jori spotted Larry driving by in the neighborhood, he’d holler, “There go my daddy!” and run after him.
When Larry walked out on her and the kids, Arleen was working at the Mainstay Suites, by the airport. In despair, she quit and began relying on welfare. Sometime later she found work cleaning the Third Street Pier restaurant, but then her mother died suddenly. The grief overwhelmed her, and she left that job too. She later regretted going back on welfare, but it was a dark time.
When she moved onto Thirteenth Street, Arleen was receiving W-2 T, owing mainly to her chronic depression. She received the same stipend in 2008 that she would have when welfare was reformed over a decade earlier: $20.65 a day, $7,536 a year. Since 1997, welfare stipends in Milwaukee and almost everywhere else have not budged, even as housing costs have soared. For years, politicians have known that families could not survive on welfare alone.1 This was the case before rent and utility costs climbed throughout the 2000s, and it was 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.
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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, Arleen cracked the door and wedged her leg and foot behind it, in case they tried to push through.
A young woman introduced herself as the previous tenant and said she had come to collect her things. The armoire, dresser, and refrigerator all belonged to her.