The small act of screening could have big consequences. From thousands of yes/no decisions emerged a geography of advantage and disadvantage that characterized the modern American city: good schools and failing ones, safe streets and dangerous ones.9 Landlords were major players in distributing the spoils. They decided who got to live where. And their screening practices (or lack thereof) revealed why crime and gang activity or an area’s civic engagement and its spirit of neighborliness could vary drastically from one block to the next. They also helped explain why on the same block in the same low-income neighborhood, one apartment complex but not another became familiar to the police.10
Screening practices that banned criminality and poverty in the same stroke drew poor families shoulder to shoulder with drug dealers, sex offenders, and other lawbreakers in places with lenient requirements. Neighborhoods marred by high poverty and crime were that way not only because poverty could incite crime, and crime could invite poverty, but also because the techniques landlords used to “keep illegal and destructive activity out of rental property” kept poverty out as well. This also meant that violence, drug activity, deep poverty, and other social problems coalesced at a much smaller, more acute level than the neighborhood. They gathered at the same address.
For people familiar with hunger and scarcity, addiction and prison, that often meant being isolated from job networks and exposed to vice and violence. But it also meant people could air problems; swap food, clothes, and information; and finish one another’s sentences about lousy jobs or social workers or prison (“They put gravy—”…“On everything!”). It meant that, should they be in the early stages of opiate withdrawal, they could take a walk around their trailer park to calm the shakes and run into a fellow junkie who could give them what they needed.
Some landlords neglected to screen tenants for the same reason payday lenders offered unsecured, high-interest loans to families with unpaid debt or lousy credit; for the same reason that the subprime industry gave mortgages to people who could not afford them; for the same reason Rent-A-Center allowed you to take home a new Hisense air conditioner or Klaussner “Lazarus” reclining sofa without running a credit check. There was a business model at the bottom of every market.11
“Questions?” Karen’s eyes panned the room.
“Should I do a short-term or long-term lease?”
“First, do a lease. Please. Put it in writing. Between sixty and seventy percent of rental agreements in this state are verbal.”
A man in a camouflage hat raised his hand with a question about evictions: “Do you have to leave them there for three months or some foolish thing?”
“No. Nothing protects you from not paying the rent.”
“Is there a maximum charge for a late fee?”
The room laughed nervously, and Karen frowned at the question.
“Can you go in any of the common areas, the hallways, the open basement, without any notice?”
Karen paused for effect. She smiled at the woman who had asked the question. She was a black woman, probably in her fifties, who had sat in the front row and taken notes throughout the day.
“What is the answer?” Karen asked the room.
“Yes,” came the reply from several fellow landlords.
Karen nodded and looked back at the woman. “Okay, say this with me: This is my property.”
“This is my property,” the woman responded.
“This is my property.” Karen said it louder and raised her hands, inviting the room to echo.
“This is my property,” the landlords answered.
“This is myyy property!” Karen boomed, her finger pointing to the land below.
The voices in the room went up in unison, a proud and powerful chorus: “This is my property! Myyyyy property!”
—
After receiving the eviction notice, it took Teddy a couple days to decide it was time to go home to Tennessee. He called one of his sisters, who told him that she’d be sending her husband up with the van. Teddy sent her a $500 money order. “I don’t want to go to them broke,” he told Scott, which also told him his money was gone.
Scott saw that he needed a plan. So he rang up Pito, an old Narcotics Anonymous buddy, and asked if he had any work. Pito connected Scott with Mira, a take-no-shit lesbian from Puerto Rico, who offered him a job cleaning out foreclosed homes. Mira paid Scott and the other crewmen in cash. The amounts varied widely; Scott didn’t understand or ask why. They gave scrappers the metal and sold some valuables here and there, hauling the rest to the dump.
Scott was stunned by what people left behind. Sofas, computers, stainless-steel ranges. Children’s clothes with the tags on them, tricycles, holiday decorations in basement bins, frozen pork chops, cans of green beans. Sheeted mattresses, file cabinets, framed posters and prayers and inspirational verses, curtains, blouses on hangers, lawn mowers, pictures. Sometimes the houses were humble and squat with cracked windows and grease on the ceiling. Sometimes they were cavernous, with thick carpet, master bathrooms, and back decks. To Scott, it felt like the whole city was being tossed out.
“Sometimes you walk into a house, and it’s like, they just walk out with the clothes on their back,” Scott was saying over another breakfast beer with Teddy. It had been roughly a week since they had received their eviction notice. “There’s some profundity in it that I don’t understand yet.”
“I wish I could work,” Teddy answered. “I wish I could be outside and work. But the shape that I’m in.”
Scott wasn’t interested in the work but the wreckage. “I can’t figure out what happened to the people,” he continued. “It’s really—” He let the word float.
“Scott,” Teddy said, slowly turning toward him. “You’re just like my family. I hate to leave you, but I’m headed back home.”
“I don’t even like you,” Scott responded with a grin.
“I know that’s just a lie. I know you don’t want to see me go. But I know you know it’s got to be done.”
Around sunrise Saturday morning, a white van pulled up to the trailer. Scott placed a bag of Teddy’s clothes and his fishing gear in the back and helped his old friend into the passenger seat. Teddy’s bendless arm raised in a quiet goodbye, as if by string, as the van pulled away under a Harley-Davidson–orange sky.
The following evening around dusk, while Scott was out with Mira’s crew, people started raiding his trailer. Teddy was gone, and everyone in the trailer park knew that Scott would soon be too. They started small, taking shirts, movies, jackets, a backpack. Then they went for the larger items, carrying out the table, the couch, the crucifixion painting.
Larraine’s brother-in-law, Lane, a skinny man with dark hair and a gold necklace, watched from his daisy-yellow trailer. “Buzzards,” he said, shaking his head. “You’d better close your mouth when you sleep, or these people will steal the gold right out of your teeth.”
When Scott got home that night and realized what had happened, he rushed to check if the plastic container in his room—the one stuffed with photographs, diplomas, and memories, hard evidence that he had once been someone else—was still there. It was. They had taken the bed but left the box. It felt like a gift. Scott then walked slowly from room to room, noticing what had been snatched and what was unwanted even by the desperate. No one took the books or the Polaroid camera, but they had collected the empty beer cans to recycle. Scott fingered the remainders like he sometimes did in the foreclosed homes, studying them as if they were dug-up artifacts or fossils.
He thought of the last home he had cleaned out that night. From the outside, it looked like any other house. But inside, he had found a stripper’s pole attached to a homemade stage encircled by couches. Hard-core pornography was strewn about everywhere. There were three bedrooms upstairs. Two were covered in more smut. Scott opened the door to the third and stared down at a twin bed, toys, and half-finished homework. Most abandoned homes left him few clues about the people who had lived there. As he went about his work, Scott would fill in the rest, imagining laughter around the dinner table, sleeping faces in the morning, a man shaving in the bathroom. This last house told its own story. Thinking of that one bedroom, Scott sat down on his empty floor, in his gutted-out trailer, and wept.
8.
CHRISTMAS IN ROOM 400