Then, a few days after the shooting, another tenant phoned Sherrena to say that her house was being shut down. Sherrena didn’t believe it until she pulled up and spotted white men in hard hats screwing green boards over her windows. The tenants had been caught stealing electricity, so the We Energies men had disconnected service at the pole and placed a call to the Department of Neighborhood Services (DNS). The tenants had to be out that day.3
In Milwaukee and across the nation, most renters were responsible for keeping the lights and heat on, but that had become increasingly difficult to do. Since 2000, the cost of fuels and utilities had risen by more than 50 percent, thanks to increasing global demand and the expiration of price caps. In a typical year, almost 1 in 5 poor renting families nationwide missed payments and received a disconnection notice from their utility company.4 Families who couldn’t both make rent and keep current with the utility company sometimes paid a cousin or neighbor to reroute the meter. As much as $6 billion worth of power was pirated across America every year. Only cars and credit cards got stolen more.5 Stealing gas was much more difficult and rare. It was also unnecessary in the wintertime, when the city put a moratorium on disconnections. On that April day when the moratorium lifted, gas operators returned to poor neighborhoods with their stacks of disconnection notices and toolboxes. We Energies disconnected roughly 50,000 households each year for nonpayment. Many tenants who in the winter stayed current on their rent at the expense of their heating bill tried in the summer to climb back in the black with the utility company by shorting their landlord. Come the following winter, they had to be connected to benefit from the moratorium on disconnection. So every year in Milwaukee evictions spiked in the summer and early fall and dipped again in November, when the moratorium began.6
Sherrena watched the DNS hard hats march around her property. There were few things that frustrated landlords more than clipboard-in-hand building inspectors. When they were not shutting down a property, they were scrutinizing apartments for code violations. Upon request, DNS would send a building inspector to any property. The service was designed to protect the city’s most vulnerable renters from negligent landlords, but to Sherrena and other property owners, tenants called for small, cosmetic things—and often because they were trying to stop an eviction or retaliate against landlords. Sherrena thought about the money she had just lost: a few thousand dollars for electrical work and unpaid rent. She remembered taking a chance on this family, feeling sorry for the mother who had told Sherrena she was trying to leave her abusive boyfriend. Sherrena had decided to rent to her and her children even though the woman had been evicted three times in the past two years. “There’s me having a heart again,” she thought.
—
Sherrena drove off Wright Street and headed north. Since she was in this part of town, she decided to make one more stop: her duplex on Thirteenth and Keefe. Sherrena had let a new tenant move in the previous month with a partial rent and security deposit payment.
The tenant was sitting on her stoop in a long-sleeved flannel shirt, hushing a colicky baby and talking with her mother, who was leaning against a car. Seeing Sherrena, the young woman wasted no time. “My son is sick because my house is cold,” she said. Her voice was tired. “The window have a hole in it, and I’ve been waiting patiently. I mean, I’m ready to move.”
Sherrena tilted her head, confused. The window had a hole, not a crater, and it was warm enough outside that children were still swimming in Lake Michigan. How could the house be cold?
“I done called the city,” the mother added, peeling herself off the car. She was slender and tall, her hair frizzed by the late-summer humidity.
Sherrena took a breath. There were worse houses on the block, but Sherrena knew her place on Thirteenth Street wasn’t up to code. She would say almost no house in the city was, a commentary on the mismatch between Milwaukee’s worn-out housing stock and its exacting building code. Thanks to the tenant’s mother, an inspector would arrive in a few days. He would jiggle the stair banister, photograph the hole in the window, shimmy the unhinged front door. Every code violation would cost Sherrena money.
“That wasn’t right for you to do that,” Sherrena said, “because I was working with her.”
“Then fix the window,” the mother replied.
“We will! But if she don’t call us to let us know—”
“She don’t have no phone, that’s why I called!” the mother interrupted.
As the conversation grew louder, a crowd gathered. “Who’s she?” a young boy asked. “Landlord,” came a reply.
“I didn’t know you were going to call the building inspector, Momma,” the tenant said, nervously.
“It’s too late now. The damage is done,” Sherrena said. She shook her head and, hands on her hips, looked at the young woman with the baby. “It’s always the ones that I try to help that I have the problems out of. And I’m not saying that you a problem, but it’s just that, somebody else is involved, and you the one living here. So it puts you in a spot.”
“Well, let me ask you something.” The tenant’s mother stepped closer and the crowd with her. “If this was your daughter and these were your grandkids, what would you do?”
Sherrena didn’t step back. She looked up at the mother, noticing her gold front tooth, and answered, “I would have definitely made a connection with the landlord and not called the city.”
Sherrena pushed past the crowd and stepped briskly to her car. When she got home, she opened the door and yelled, “Quentin, we done walked straight into some bullshit!”
Sherrena sat down in her paper-cluttered home office. The office was one of five bedrooms in Sherrena and Quentin’s home, which sat in a quiet middle-class black neighborhood off Capitol Drive. The house had a finished basement with an inset Jacuzzi tub. Sherrena and Quentin had furnished it with beige leather furniture, large brass and crystal light fixtures, and gold-colored curtains. The kitchen was spacious and unused, since they ate out most days. Typically the only things in the refrigerator were restaurant doggie bags.
“Huh?” Quentin called back, coming down the stairs.
“The girl downstairs at Thirteenth Street? Her momma done called the building inspector….Her mother was outside talking shit!”
Quentin listened to the story and said, “Put her out.”
Sherrena thought about it for a moment, then agreed. She reached in a drawer and began filling out a five-day eviction notice. The law forbade landlords from retaliating against tenants who contacted DNS. But landlords could at any time evict tenants for being behind on rent or for other violations.
By the time Quentin and Sherrena pulled the Suburban onto Thirteenth Street, night had fallen. The apartment door was open. Sherrena walked right through it without knocking and handed the young tenant an eviction notice, saying, “Here. I hope you get some assistance.”
A man followed Sherrena out the door and stood on the unlit porch. “Excuse me,” he called out as Sherrena met Quentin in the street. “You’re evicting her?”
“She told me she wanted to move, so that let me know she wasn’t going to pay anything else,” Sherrena answered.
“She told you she wanted the windows fixed.”
Quentin interjected, looking at Sherrena, “He ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.”
“I got everything to do with it, blood. This my stepdaughter here!”
“You don’t even stay here though, man!” Quentin yelled back.
“Ain’t nobody want to live like that….Fuck you mean, I don’t have nothing to do with it?”
Quentin opened the Suburban’s door and pulled out his security belt, equipped with handcuffs, a small baton, and a canister of Mace the size of a small fire extinguisher. Quentin had been here before. There was the tenant who told him he was going to take his security deposit out of Quentin’s pocket. There was the one who said he was going to shoot him in the face.
The tenant’s mother joined the stepfather on the dark porch. “Are you evicting her?” she asked.