Maybe it began in the late fifteenth century, the weaponry of war to blame. With the invention of the iron cannonball, cities could no longer rely on moats and modest ramparts to fend off attack. Complicated systems of defense had to be constructed and cities had to grow vertically behind high walls. Old Geneva and Paris saw tenements climb six stories. Edinburgh boasted of tenements twice as high. While agrarian families were driven from the land to increasingly congested cities, the competition for space drove up land values and rents. Urban landlords quickly realized that piles of money could be made by creating slums: “maximum profits came, not from providing first-class accommodations for those who could well afford them…but from crowded slum accommodations, for those whose pennies were scarcer than the rich man’s pounds.”12 Beginning in the sixteenth century, slum housing would be reserved not only for outcasts, beggars, and thieves but for a large segment of the population.
During its rapid period of urbanization, America imported this model. Colonial proprietors adopted the institutions and laws of England’s landed gentry, including the doctrine of absolute liability for rent, which held tenants unequivocally responsible for payments even in the event of fire or flood. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, America’s poor lived in cellars, attics, cattle sheds, and windowless rooms that held multiple families.13 Some slums were cut off from basic municipal services and local wells; so families begged for water in other parts of town.14 Rents continued to rise as living conditions deteriorated. Soon, many families could not afford their housing. When this happened, landlords could summon the “privilege of distress,” which entitled them to seize and sell tenants’ property to recover lost profit, a practice that persisted well into the twentieth century.15
Racial oppression enabled land exploitation on a massive scale. During slavery, black slaves pulled profit from the dirt but had no claim to the land. After the Civil War, freed slaves saw in landownership the possibility of true liberation, but during Reconstruction wealthy whites maintained a virtual monopoly on the soil as lands seized from or abandoned by Confederates were restored to their original owners. Returning to plantations as sharecroppers, black families descended into a cycle of subsistence farming and debt, while white planters continued to grow rich.16 The slave shacks stood, and so did the plantation mansions.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, African-American families seeking freedom and good jobs participated in the Great Migration, moving en masse from the rural South to cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. When they arrived in those cities, they were crowded into urban ghettos, and the vast majority depended on landlords for housing.17 Ghetto landlords had a segregated and captive tenant base and had nothing to gain by improving their run-down houses. They began dividing their properties into small “kitchenette” units, throwing up so many plywood walls their apartments resembled “rabbit warrens.” Many houses lacked heating and complete plumbing. So black families cooked and ate in winter coats and relieved themselves in outhouses or homemade toilets.18 They came to know well the sound of the tuberculosis cough. In 1930, the death rate for Milwaukee’s blacks was nearly 60 percent higher than the citywide rate, due in large part to poor housing conditions.19 For the first time in the history of America, New Deal policies made homeownership a real possibility for white families, but black families were denied these benefits when the federal government deemed their neighborhoods too risky for insured mortgages and officials loyal to Jim Crow blocked black veterans from using GI mortgages.20 Over three centuries of systematic dispossession from the land created a semipermanent black rental class and an artificially high demand for inner-city apartments.21
In the 1950s, white real estate brokers developed an advanced technique of exploitation, one that targeted black families shut out of the private housing market. After buying houses on the cheap from nervous white homeowners in transitioning neighborhoods, private investors would sell these houses “on contract” to black families for double or triple their assessed value. Black buyers had to come up with sizeable down payments, often upwards of 25 percent of the property’s inflated value. Once they moved in, black families had all the responsibilities of home ownership without any of the rights. When families missed payments, which many did after monthly installments were increased or necessary housing upkeep set them back, they could be evicted as their homes were foreclosed and down payments pocketed. The profits were staggering. In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landlord simply replied, “That’s why I bought the building.”22
The 1968 Civil Rights Act made housing discrimination illegal, but subtler forms prevailed. Crystal and Vanetta wanted to leave the ghetto, but landlords like the one on Fifteenth Street turned them away. Other landlords and property management companies—like Affordable Rentals—tried to avoid discriminating by setting clear criteria and holding all applicants to the same standards. But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans. When Crystal and Vanetta heard back from Affordable Rentals, they learned their application had been rejected on account of their arrest and eviction history.
Eviction itself often explained why some families lived on safe streets and others on dangerous ones, why some children attended good schools and others failing ones. The trauma of being forced from your home, the blemish of an eviction record, and the taxing rush to locate a new place to live pushed evicted renters into more depressed and dangerous areas of the city.23 This reality had not yet set in for Vanetta and Crystal. They were just coming out of the first, fresh-feeling phase of house hunting. It was only after they had tried for over fifty apartments that Crystal and Vanetta began reluctantly scouting in the inner city. The new friends were circling back to the ghetto but not fully committing to it.
—
Crystal had been working to keep her emotions in check. It was why she chose to stop by church Monday night instead of looking for housing. It was why she grabbed her music and sang after the incident with the landlord on Fifteenth Street. “This is too much, too much stress. But I’m not gonna make myself sick,” she said. When Crystal finally did blow up, it was at one of the shelter’s maintenance men, over clean linens he refused to supply. She was already in trouble for sleeping through a mandatory job training. Crystal blamed her sleep apnea. After the altercation with the maintenance man, Crystal was told to be out by breakfast the next morning.
Crystal spent the following day on the phone, trying to find someone who would open their doors to her. With no luck and night coming on, she sighed and called Minister Barber, who found an older couple in the congregation who agreed to help. Crystal spent the night in their La-Z-Boy recliner.
The following evening, after Bible study at Mt. Calvary, Crystal returned to the elderly couple’s house. Rain was falling hard onto dark, empty streets. It was that icy, bitter rain that comes when winter first begins to thaw into spring. Crystal knocked, and the husband cracked the door without unlatching the chain. The house was on Fourteenth and Burleigh, in one of the most crime-ridden areas of the city. Seeing Crystal, the man kept the chain taut, handed over a small bag of Crystal’s things, and shut the door.
Crystal figured it was because she didn’t “hit their hand.” But she didn’t have any money to give, having lent one of her cousins $400, mostly from her casino winnings. Her cousin needed rent money. When Vanetta heard about that, she said, “Crystal, if I was there I would have smacked the mess outta you! You don’t have a place to stay yourself. I don’t care if they your family or not, you been homeless for a grip, and you need a roof over your own head.”