Buck and DeMarcus showed up, along with Luke, Eddy, and a half dozen other neighborhood boys who had come to see Lamar’s home as their own. They spread out in the spacious two-bedroom apartment, dipped roller and brush into a five-gallon bucket, and started slathering the walls. They worked earnestly and with a quiet seriousness. After a while, some tossed their hoodies and shirts on the floor, painting bare-chested.5
Lamar paused to take in the scene. Just the previous winter, he had climbed into an abandoned house, high on crack. When the high wore off, he found he couldn’t climb out; his feet had frozen. Lamar kept partying after returning home from the navy. In the mid-1980s, crack hit the streets of Milwaukee, and Lamar started smoking it. He got hooked. His coworkers at Athea knew it because he wouldn’t have cigarette money a couple days after payday. Lamar remembered losing his job and apartment. After that, he took Luke and Eddy to shelters and abandoned houses, tearing up the carpet so they could have a blanket at night. Luke and Eddy’s mother was around back then, but her addiction eventually consumed her, and she gave up her boys. Lamar ate snow during the days he was trapped in the abandoned house. His feet swelled purple and black with frostbite until they looked like rotten fruit. He was delirious when, on the eighth day, he jumped out of an upper-floor window. He would say God threw him out. When he woke up in the hospital, his legs were gone. Except for two brief relapses, he had not smoked crack since.
“I’m blessed,” Lamar said, looking at Luke and Eddy. The white paint misting from the rollers freckled their black skin. “My boys okay.”
—
The following month, Sherrena was driving through heavy rain. Traffic sounded like a thousand mop buckets being tossed out the back door. She was headed to a meeting of the Milwaukee Real Estate Investors Networking Group (RING), at the Best Western Hotel by the airport, on the far South Side of the city. Fifty people showed up, including investors, mold assessors, lawyers, and other players in real estate, but the majority of the people in the room were landlords. Men, mostly—young men in ties, many the sons of landlords but taking notes anyway; foot-tapping middle-aged men in leather jackets and boots; older men in caps and flannel shirts with knuckles like tree knots.6 Sherrena stood out as a woman, and especially as a black woman. Besides her friend Lora, who had moved from Jamaica thirty years ago, Sherrena was the only black person in the room. Almost everyone else was white, with names like Eric, Mark, or Kathy.
A couple of generations ago, a gathering like this would have been virtually unheard-of. Many landlords were part-timers: machinists or preachers or police officers who came to own property almost by accident (through inheritance, say) and saw real estate as a side gig.7 But the last forty years had witnessed the professionalization of property management. Since 1970, the number of people primarily employed as property managers had more than quadrupled.8 As more landlords began buying more property and thinking of themselves primarily as landlords (instead of people who happened to own the unit downstairs), professional associations proliferated, and with them support services, accreditations, training materials, and financial instruments. According to the Library of Congress, only three books offering apartment-management advice were published between 1951 and 1975. Between 1976 and 2014, the number rose to 215.9 Even if most landlords in a given city did not consider themselves “professionals,” housing had become a business.
The evening’s speaker was Ken Shields, from the Self Storage Brokers of America. After selling his insurance company, Shields had begun looking for a way to get into real estate. He started out with rooming houses, which meant he started out renting mainly to poor single men. “Very nice cash flow. But I no longer have them.” The room chuckled. “I made some good money, and I mean, I love to get money, but I’m still just as happy not running around and dealing with some of these dregs of society who live in rooming houses.”10 Sherrena, who owned a couple of rooming houses, laughed along with the room. Then Shields found self-storage. “It’s got the residual incomes of an apartment building, but,” he lowered his voice, squinted, “you don’t have the people. You just got their stuff!…This is the sweetest spot in the whole American economy. A receptacle for an enormous cascade of money.”
The landlords loved Ken Shields, even if he did live in Illinois. When he finished his speech, the room broke into applause. The RING president, a mustached man with a full pouch for a stomach, stood up clapping. When there wasn’t a speaker, he often organized round robins. One such evening, a woman from Lead and Asbestos Information Center, Inc., had started off by announcing, “There is money to be made on lead,” to a room of landlords who more often lost money trying to abate it. One landlord asked whether he would have to report the presence of asbestos to the city or the tenants if he tested for it. “No, you don’t,” the woman had said.
The conversation moved on and someone else had asked about garnishing wages. A lawyer informed the room that a landlord was allowed to garnish a tenant’s bank account and up to 20 percent of his or her income, but the last $1,000 was exempt. And welfare recipients were off-limits.
“How about intercepting their tax refund?” Sherrena had asked.
The lawyer looked a bit stunned. “Noooo, only the governor can do that.”
Sherrena already knew that. She had looked into it before. Her question wasn’t a question; it was a message to Eric, Mark, Kathy, and everyone else in the room that she would do almost anything to get the rent. Many white landlords knew money could be made in the inner city, where property was cheap, but the thought of collecting payments on the North Side, let alone passing out eviction notices, made them nervous. Sherrena wanted them to know that she could help. For the right price, she would manage their property or consult with them about where to buy in the ghetto; she would be their broker to black Milwaukee. After that meeting, white landlords had surrounded Sherrena, who had worn a denim jacket with MILLION DOLLAR BABY $ bedazzled in rhinestones on the back. She poked fun as she collected business cards: “Don’t be afraid of the North Side!”
As people started to leave, Sherrena and Lora found a quiet spot in the hallway. “I got drama,” Sherrena began. “Drama for your momma! Me and Lamar Richards are going at it again—the man with no legs. He shorted me on my rent this month.”
“How much?” Lora’s voice, with soft traces of the island accent, belonged to a librarian. She was older than Sherrena and that night was elegantly dressed in dark slacks, gold earrings, and a layered red blouse. She folded her fur-lined coat on her lap.
“Thirty dollars.” Sherrena shrugged. “But that’s not it. It’s the principle….He already owes me two sixty for that bad job for the painting.”
When Lamar and the boys had finished painting, he called Sherrena, and she came over. She noticed that the boys had not filled in the holes; had dripped white paint on the brown trim; had ignored the pantry. Lamar said Quentin had not dropped off hole-filler or brown paint. “You’re supposed to go and ask for it, then,” Sherrena snapped back. She refused to credit Lamar a cent toward his debt.
“And then,” Sherrena continued, “he did his bathroom floor over without my knowledge and deducted thirty dollars out of the rent.” When painting, Lamar had found a box of tile in Patrice’s old place and had used it to retile his bathroom floor, securing each piece with leftover paint. “I told him, ‘Do not—do not ever deduct any more rent from me ever again!’ Plus, how can you deduct when you owe me?”
Lora recrossed her legs. “He’s a player, that’s all he is. Time for him to go….They just try to take, take, take, take, take.”
“The thing is”—Sherrena circled back to Lamar’s painting job—“I would have never paid anybody two sixty to do that.”
“I can get painting done in five rooms, thirty bucks a room, a hundred and fifty dollars.”
“No, no, no. Our people do it for twenty dollars a room, twenty-five at the most.”
“Exactly.”