Trailer park residents rarely raised a fuss about a neighbor’s eviction, whether that person was a known drug addict or not. Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They “helped get rid of the riffraff,” some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.2
In years past, renters opposed landlords and saw themselves as a “class” with shared interests and a unified purpose. During the early twentieth century, tenants organized against evictions and unsanitary conditions. When landlords raised rents too often or too steeply, tenants went so far as to stage rent strikes. Strikers joined together to withhold rent and form picket lines, risking eviction, arrest, and beatings by hired thugs. They were not an especially radical bunch, these strikers. Most were ordinary mothers and fathers who believed landlords were entitled to modest rent increases and fair profits, but not “price gouging.” In New York City, the great rent wars of the Roaring Twenties forced a state legislature to impose rent controls that remain the country’s strongest to this day.3
Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience—this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision. “For a protest movement to arise out of [the] traumas of daily life,” the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have observed, “the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable.”4 This usually happened during extraordinary times, when large-scale social transformations or economic disturbances—the postwar housing shortage, say—profoundly upset the status quo. But it was not enough simply to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them—which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.
During rent strikes, tenants believed they had a moral obligation to one another.5 If tenants resisted excessive rent hikes or unwarranted evictions, it was because they invested in their homes and neighborhoods. They felt they belonged there. In the trailer park, that sentiment was almost dead. For most residents, Scott among them, the goal was to leave, not to plant roots and change things. Some residents described themselves as “just passing through,” even if they had been passing through nearly all their life. One, an out-of-work father of three who powered his trailer with stolen electricity, said, “We don’t let family come here. It’s not us. It’s lower-class living, and I didn’t come from this.” Lenny’s ex-wife, who being Lenny’s ex-wife was virtually married to the trailer park at one time, liked to tell people, “You forget that I’m the one that used to go to the opera.” Tam, the pregnant drug addict, thought of the trailer park “as a hotel.”
Poor neighborhoods provided their residents with quite a lot. In the trailer park, residents met people who knew how to pirate cable, when the best food pantries were open, and how to apply for SSI. All over the city, people who lived in distressed neighborhoods were more likely to help their neighbors pay bills, buy groceries, fix their car, or lend a hand in other ways, compared to their peers in better-off areas.6 These exchanges helped people on the receiving end meet basic material needs; and they helped those on the delivering end feel more fully human.
But for such vital exchanges to take place, residents had to make their needs known and acknowledge their failures. For Larraine to ask her neighbor if she could use her shower, she needed to explain that her gas had been shut off. That fact became public when she walked back to her trailer with wet hair. On another occasion, a tenant named Rose had her children taken by Child Protective Services. Trailer park residents sat beside her as she wailed. They comforted her and made sure she didn’t hurt herself, but because they saw what had happened, they also judged her. “It ain’t nothing to be proud of,” Dawn told her. “But the Lord took ’em for some reason.”7
When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice, full of “all sorts of shipwrecked humanity,” they lost confidence in its political capacity.8 Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma—believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addiction, and other harrowing events—were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives.9 This lack of faith had less to do with their neighborhood’s actual poverty and crime rates than with the level of concentrated suffering they perceived around them. A community that saw so clearly its own pain had a difficult time also sensing its potential.
Every so often, Tobin’s tenants would air a passing remark about their landlord’s profits or call him a greedy Jew. “That Cadillac got some shiny rims. I know that didn’t cost no ten dollars.” “He just wants to butter his pockets.” But for the most part, tenants had a high tolerance for inequality. They spent little time questioning the wide gulf separating their poverty from Tobin’s wealth or asking why rent for a worn-out aluminum-wrapped trailer took such a large chunk of their income. Their focus was on smaller, more tangible problems. When Witkowski reported Tobin’s annual income to be close to $1 million, a man who lived on the same side of the park as Scott said, “I’d give two shits….As long as he keeps things the way he’s supposed to here, and I don’t have to worry about the freaking ceiling caving in, I don’t care.”
Most renters in Milwaukee thought highly of their landlord.10 Who had time to protest inequality when you were trying to get the rotten spot in your floorboard patched before your daughter put her foot through it again? Who cared what the landlord was making as long as he was willing to work with you until you got back on your feet? There was always something worse than the trailer park, always room to drop lower. Residents were reminded of this when the whole park was threatened with eviction, and they felt it again when men from Bieck Management began collecting rents.11
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It had been a bad week. First Scott lost his keys and decided to break into his apartment by putting a fist through the front window. Then his electricity went out. Then Mira fired him. Nothing personal: she had found a crew of hypes willing to work for $25 a day. In NA, Scott had learned that addiction tightened its grip when you were hungry, angry, lonely, or tired—“HALT”—and Scott was all four. After Mira fired him, he used part of his last paycheck to get drunk and high at a friend’s house. That’s when he called his mom, a hospital housekeeper in rural Iowa. On the phone, Scott told his mother about his drinking (but not the heroin) and about losing his nursing license after getting hooked on painkillers. She knew none of it. Scott hadn’t spoken to his mother in over a year.
“Mom,” Scott was crying. “I’m sorry. I’m a mess. I’m a fucking mess.”