Sherrena decided to evict Arleen. The funeral and subsequent welfare sanction had put Arleen too far behind: $870. Sherrena felt it was time to “let go and move on to the next tenant.” Earlier in the month, she had filed the paperwork and received a court date of December 23, which would be the last eviction court before Christmas that year. Sherrena knew the courthouse would be packed. Many parents chose to take their chances with their landlords rather than face their children empty-handed on Christmas morning.1 A new tenant had already asked Sherrena if a portion of her rent money could be returned so she could buy gifts. Sherrena told her, “You gotta have a house to put the Christmas tree and presents in….You’ve been knowing Christmas was coming eleven months ago.”
The night before Sherrena and Arleen’s date in eviction court, snow began to fall. When Milwaukeeans woke up the following morning, they found their city buried in it. People in parkas and knit hats shuffled the sidewalks. Mothers with bundled-up children huddled under bus-stop awnings, shifting their weight from one leg to the other. The city’s smokestacks billowed cotton-thick clouds of steam into a pale sky. Holiday decorations dotted the North Side: a black Nativity, a snowman smiling from an abandoned lot.
Sherrena pulled up to the Milwaukee County Courthouse. The courthouse had been built in 1931 but made to look like it had always been there. Corinthian columns, taller and thicker than oak trunks, encircled the building, lifting its roof high above downtown. The building was enormous, with an imposing limestone fa?ade on which the architects had etched in block letters: VOX POPULI VOX DEI. The voice of the people is the voice of God.
Sherrena wondered if Arleen would show. Most of the time, tenants didn’t, and Sherrena preferred it that way. She had learned that it didn’t matter how much kindness you had shown a tenant up to that point. “All that stuff goes out the window” in court. Sherrena had brought Arleen milk and groceries. She’d even had a worker deliver a stove that was sitting unused in one of her vacant units. But she knew that, once in front of the commissioner, Arleen was more likely to bring up the time the water heater went out or mention the hole in the window Quentin still hadn’t fixed. Still, Sherrena had called Arleen that morning to remind her about court. She didn’t have to, but she had a soft spot for Arleen. Plus, Sherrena worried more about the commissioners. She thought they were sympathetic to tenants and tried to block landlords with technicalities. Sherrena had had a couple cases thrown out on account of paperwork errors. When that happened, she had to start the eviction process all over again, which usually meant losing another month’s rent on that unit. When things went her way, however, she could have the eviction squad physically remove tenants within ten days.
Once she was through security, Sherrena made her way to Room 400, Milwaukee County Small Claims Court, the busiest courtroom in the state.2 Her footsteps clacked on the marble floors and echoed off the vaulted ceilings. She passed lawyers in trench coats, staring at the floor and talking on their cell phones, and young parents with children, gaping like tourists. The courtroom was full. Women and men were squeezed into long wooden pews and stood lining the walls, their bodies warming the chamber. Sherrena looked for a seat, waving at landlords she recognized.
At the back of the courtroom, landlords were talking tenants into stipulation agreements, offering to dismiss evictions if tenants caught up on the rent. One, a white man in a leather jacket who had been in the local paper a few months back for racking up hundreds of property violations, was joking with his young female assistant when a tenant approached. The tenant was a black woman, likely in her fifties. Her shoulders were uplifted under her worn overcoat. She reached into her purse and handed the landlord $700 in cash.
“I’m hoping—” she began.
The landlord cut her off. “Don’t hope. Write the check.”
“I can get you another six hundred in two weeks.”
The landlord asked her to sign a stipulation, which included a $55 late fee. She reached for his pen.3
Toward the front of the room, in a reserved space with tables and plenty of empty chairs, sat lawyers in pinstripe suits and power ties. They had been hired by landlords. Some sat with manila folders stacked in front of them, reading the paper or filling in the crossword. Others joked with the bailiff, who periodically broke conversation to tell a tenant to remove his hat or lower her voice. Everyone in the reserved space, the lawyers and bailiff, was white.
In front of the lawyers, a large wooden desk faced the crowd. Two women sat on either side of the desk, calling out the day’s cases and taking attendance. Most of the names flung into the air went unclaimed. Roughly 70 percent of tenants summoned to Milwaukee’s eviction court didn’t come. The same was true in other major cities. In some urban courts, only 1 tenant in 10 showed.4 Some tenants couldn’t miss work or couldn’t find child care or were confused by the whole process or couldn’t care less or would rather avoid the humiliation.5 When tenants did not show up and their landlord or a representative did, the caller applied three quick stamps to the file—indicating that the tenant had received a default eviction judgment—and placed it on top of a growing pile. The sound of eviction court was a soft hum of dozens of people sighing, coughing, murmuring, and whispering to children interspersed with the cadence of a name, a pause, and three loud thumps of the stamp.
Behind the front desk, framed between two grand wooden columns, hung a large painting of Moses descending Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments unbroken. He glared down at the Israelites in the desert, dancing around the golden calf. Doorways on either side of the callers’ desk led to commissioners’ offices, where the actual hearings took place. When their case was called, landlords and tenants walked through a side doorway, usually to emerge just a few minutes later.
A black woman whose hearing had just concluded stepped back into the room, holding her child’s hand. Her head was wrapped, and she had kept on her heavy blue winter coat. She continued down the middle aisle of Room 400, walking by an anemic white man with homemade tattoos, a white woman in a wheelchair wearing pajama pants and Crocs, a blind black man with a limp hat on his lap, a Hispanic man wearing work boots and a shirt that read PRAY FOR US—all waiting for their eviction cases. Tenants in eviction court were generally poor, and almost all of them (92 percent) had missed rent payments. The majority spent at least half their household income on rent. One-third devoted at least 80 percent to it.6 Of the tenants who did come to court and were evicted, only 1 in 6 had another place lined up: shelters or the apartments of friends or family. A few resigned themselves to the streets. Most simply did not know where they would go.7