Thanks to some loans and scholarships, I was able to attend Arizona State University, a four-hour drive from my hometown of Winslow. I thought I might want to be a lawyer, so I enrolled in courses on communication, history, and justice. In those classes, I began learning things that did not square with the image of America passed down to me from my parents, Sunday-school teachers, and Boy Scout troop leaders. Was the depth and expanse of poverty in this country truly unmatched in the developed world? Was the American Dream widely attainable or reserved for a privileged few? When I wasn’t working or studying, I was thumbing through books in the library, seeking answers about the character of my country.
It was around that time that the bank took my childhood home. A friend and I made the four-hour drive and helped my parents move. I remember being deeply sad and embarrassed. I didn’t know how to make sense of it, but maybe something worked its way inside because, once back on campus, I found myself spending weekends helping my girlfriend build houses with Habitat for Humanity. Then I began hanging out with homeless people around Tempe’s Mill Avenue several nights a week. The people I met living on the street were young and old, funny, genuine, and troubled. When I graduated, I felt a need to understand poverty in America, which I saw as the wellspring of so many miseries. I figured sociology would be the best place to do that. So I enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a town that grizzled Milwaukeeans refer to as “thirty square miles surrounded by reality.”
When I began studying poverty as a graduate student, I learned that most accounts explained inequality in one of two ways. The first referenced “structural forces” seemingly beyond our control: historical legacies of discrimination, say, or massive transformations of the economy. The second emphasized individual deficiencies, from “cultural” practices, like starting a family outside of wedlock, to “human capital” shortfalls, like low levels of education. Liberals preferred the first explanation and conservatives the second. To me, both seemed off. Each treated low-income families as if they lived in quarantine. With books about single mothers, gang members, or the homeless, social scientists and journalists were writing about poor people as if they were cut off from the rest of society. The poor were said to be “invisible” or part of “the other America.” The ghetto was treated like “a city within a city.” The poor were being left out of the inequality debate, as if we believed the livelihoods of the rich and the middle class were intertwined but those of the poor and everyone else were not. Where were the rich people who wielded enormous influence over the lives of low-income families and their communities—who were rich precisely because they did so? Why, I wondered, have we documented how the poor make ends meet without asking why their bills are so high or where their money is flowing?
I wanted to try to write a book about poverty that didn’t focus exclusively on poor people or poor places. Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle. Eviction was such a process.1
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I moved into Tobin’s trailer park in May 2008, after reading in the newspaper that its residents could face mass eviction. That didn’t happen. (Tobin eventually did sell the trailer park, and Lenny and Office Susie moved elsewhere.) But I stayed anyway because the park proved a fine place to meet people getting the pink papers. It also allowed me to spend time with Tobin and Lenny.
My trailer was considered to be one of the nicest in the park. It was clean with wood paneling and thick, rust-orange carpet. But for most of the four months I lived in it, I did not have hot water because, despite multiple requests, Tobin and Lenny neglected to fix the chimney to my water heater. They just didn’t get around to it, even though I told them I was a writer working on a book about them and their trailer park. If used, the water heater would have emitted carbon monoxide straight into the trailer. Office Susie tried to fix it once. She jammed a wooden board underneath and, with two inches still separating the water heater from the chimney, pronounced it safe.
To me, ethnography is what you do when you try to understand people by allowing their lives to mold your own as fully and genuinely as possible. You do this by building rapport with the people you want to know better and following them over a long stretch of time, observing and experiencing what they do, working and playing alongside them, and recording as much action and interaction as you can until you begin to move like they move, talk like they talk, think like they think, and feel something like they feel. In this line of work, living “in the field” helps quite a lot. It’s the only way to have an immersive experience; and practically speaking, you never know when important things are going to happen. Renting a trailer allowed me to meet dozens of people, pick up on rumors, absorb tenants’ concerns and perspectives, and observe everyday life all hours of the day.
I began my fieldwork in the trailer park hanging out in the office, where some of my neighbors spent most of their days. I was in the office the evening Larraine walked in, shaking and gripping a warning from the sheriff’s eviction squad. I watched her pay Tobin what she could before dragging herself back to her trailer. I followed her there. Larraine opened the door, wiping away tears with the bottom of her shirt. That’s how we met. After word spread that I was interested in talking to people going through an eviction, Pam got ahold of my phone number and called me up. A few days after we met, I began trailing her and her family as they looked for a new place to live. Pam told Scott about my project, and he told me to stop by his trailer. When I did one morning, Scott stepped outside and said, “Let’s walk.” Then he said, “Well, let’s just get this out in the open. I was a nurse for…years. But then I got addicted to painkillers and lost everything. My job, my car, my house.”
No one really knows why some people unfurl like this in front of a stranger with a notepad and pen, why they open the door and let you in. With tenants on the verge of homelessness, there were material benefits, like access to a car and phone, and psychological ones, too. Several called me their “shrink.” But there is another truth too, which is that some people at the bottom don’t think they have anything left to lose. One evening at the Aldea Recovery House, where Scott had been living sober for a few months, Scott nodded to me scribbling away in my notepad and asked AA diehard Anna Aldea, “Does it make you nervous, having Matt here?”
“Fuck no,” Anna said. “My life is an open book.”
Said Scott, “I am the same way. You know, I’ve got no pride or anything left.”
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When fall arrived, having seen Scott, Larraine, and Pam and Ned evicted from the trailer park, I began looking for a new place to live on the North Side. One day, I mentioned this to Officer Woo, one of the security guards Tobin had been forced to hire to appease Alderman Witkowski. Woo’s real name was Kimball, but he told everyone to call him by his childhood nickname. A gregarious black man who tried to make friends with everyone in the park, he wore size 6 XL T-shirts and a security badge he had picked up at an army surplus shop.
“You talkin’ about moving out by Silver Spring?” Woo asked, thinking about an area where Milwaukee’s black inner city gave way to the northern suburbs of Glendale and Brown Deer.
“I’m thinking like city center,” I clarified.
“You want to be by Marquette?” Woo asked again, referencing the Jesuit university located downtown.
“Not by Marquette. I’m looking for an inner-city neighborhood.”