“Go ahead.” Sherrena laughed. “But my money is longer than yours.”
“If I’m giving you my money, why ain’t my stuff fixed?”
The next month, Patrice tried a different approach. If Sherrena wouldn’t respond when the rent was paid, maybe she would respond when it wasn’t. Patrice gave Sherrena half the rent and said she would get the rest after she completed the promised repairs. As it was, the rent took 65 percent of Patrice’s income. It was hard to give up such a big chunk of her paycheck to live in such conditions.
Patrice’s plan backfired. Sherrena refused to work on Patrice’s place unless she delivered her rent in full. To Patrice, it felt like a catch-22. If she was paid up, Sherrena often didn’t answer the phone until the first of the month rolled around again. If she withheld rent, Sherrena refused to fix anything until she paid. “I’m not going to rush and bust my ass to take care of a bunch of issues, and you didn’t pay me all my money,” Sherrena said. Still, Patrice wanted to stay. She liked living above her momma and thought the apartment could be nice. Then Patrice’s manager at Cousins Subs cut back her hours, and she lost what little leverage she had. After Sherrena served her the eviction notice, Patrice couldn’t catch up. She promised to give Sherrena her tax refund, but by that time it was too late. Belinda, the payee and Sherrena’s new best friend, had called asking for a place, and Sherrena jumped at the opportunity. Patrice’s place would be available in a few weeks, Sherrena promised.
—
After two months without a working bathtub or sink and with a barely working toilet, Doreen decided to call a plumber herself. Having paid for a plumber the first time things got stopped up, Sherrena was not keen to do so again. And after what had happened at Thirty-Second Street, Doreen knew better than to call a building inspector. The plumber charged $150 to snake out the pipes. He concluded that the plumbing system was old and vulnerable and advised Doreen to catch everything she could from going down the sink. The first thing Doreen did after the man left was to run a hot bath and soak in it for an hour.
Doreen decided to deduct the $150 from her rent. When Sherrena responded by saying that would earn her an eviction notice, Doreen went ahead and withheld all her rent. If she was going to get evicted, she might as well save her money to put it toward the next move.7 It was a common strategy among cash-strapped renters. Because the rent took almost all of their paycheck, families sometimes had to initiate a necessary eviction that allowed them to save enough money to move to another place. One landlord’s loss was another’s gain.8
If Doreen had to move, she knew she wouldn’t be able to find a much cheaper place, especially for three adults and five children. At the time, median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee was $600. Ten percent of units rented at or below $480, and 10 percent rented at or above $750.9 A mere $270 separated some of the cheapest units in the city from some of the most expensive. That meant that rent in some of the worst neighborhoods was not drastically cheaper than rent in much better areas. For example, in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where at least 40 percent of families lived below the poverty line, median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was only $50 less than the citywide median.10 Sherrena put it like this: “A two bedroom is a two bedroom is a two bedroom.”
This had long been the case. When tenements began appearing in New York City in the mid-1800s, rent in the worst slums was 30 percent higher than in uptown. In the 1920s and ’30s, rent for dilapidated housing in the black ghettos of Milwaukee and Philadelphia and other northern cities exceeded that for better housing in white neighborhoods. As late as 1960, rent in major cities was higher for blacks than for whites in similar accommodations.11 The poor did not crowd into slums because of cheap housing. They were there—and this was especially true of the black poor—simply because they were allowed to be.
Landlords at the bottom of the market generally did not lower rents to meet demand and avoid the costs of all those missed payments and evictions. There were costs to avoiding those costs too. For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetually behind; and many poor tenants would be perpetually behind because their rent was too high.
Tenants able to pay their rent in full each month could take advantage of legal protections designed to keep their housing safe and decent. Not only could they summon a building inspector without fear of eviction, but they also had the right to withhold rent until certain repairs were made.12 But when tenants fell behind, these protections dissolved. Tenants in arrears were barred from withholding or escrowing rent; and they tempted eviction if they filed a report with a building inspector. It was not that low-income renters didn’t know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them.
“I think callin’ a building inspector is only gonna cause more problems,” Doreen told Patrice.
“It does,” Patrice answered. “She can put us out if we call a building inspector.” What Patrice meant was that Sherrena could evict them because Doreen had violated the terms of her lease—Patrice and her kids were “unauthorized boarders”—and that she likely would if DNS were phoned.
When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond by neglecting repairs. Or as Sherrena put it to tenants: “If I give you a break, you give me a break.” Tenants could trade their dignity and children’s health for a roof over their head.13 Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem.14 More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems—as were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did not.15
Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted. But from a business point of view, this arrangement could be lucrative. The four-family property that included Doreen’s and Lamar’s apartments was Sherrena’s most profitable. Her second-most profitable property was Arleen’s place on Thirteenth Street. In Sherrena’s portfolio, her worst properties yielded her biggest returns.16
—
Shortly after Doreen told Sherrena she would be withholding her rent, Natasha discovered she was four months pregnant. When she told her momma, Doreen laughed and said, “I told you so!” She had noticed the changes Natasha had tried to ignore. Doreen was thrilled. “I’m about to be a proud grandmother again,” she crowed. Natasha’s boyfriend was thrilled. A new pregnancy, legitimate or otherwise, was something to celebrate—unless you were a young woman trying to live free and independent.17 Natasha was devastated.
“It’s probably a bigheaded boy!” Doreen teased.