Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Tobin Charney is the other landlord in the book. Old, white, and the son of a landlord, Charney, unlike Tarver, has no pretensions about who his renters are and what his relationship with them consists of. To Charney, they are nothing more than a way to make money. When the book opens, he is battling to renew the operating license for his trailer park due to the poor maintenance, derelict tenants, and high crime rates. One of his favorite methods to absolve himself of responsibility for maintenance is to “give” trailers to tenants, which means they are responsible for upkeep, and only charging them a lot fee each month. Once they fall behind on this rent, he repossesses the trailer in lieu of money owed and begins the process again. 

Arleen Belle is a single black mother with two sons, Jori and Jafaris. She was abused as a child, has a limited education, and no job prospects. She is constantly struggling to find a place to live, and this takes a toll on her physically and mentally. By the end of the book, she feels like her body is trying to shut down on her. Mentally, she must deal with the fact that whatever she does or tries to do is never enough to create a stable home life.

This also affects her sons, as Belle tries to make them stronger by not letting them become attached to anything, not even their pet cat, Little. She becomes tired of telling them what she can’t do for them. Instead, she begins to tell the boys they are bad or stupid or weak for wanting the things she can’t provide. This is one of several examples throughout the book of how the hard lives of parents directly and negatively impact their children. At the end of the book, Belle dreams of a day when they can look back on all this and laugh, but there is no indication there’s a real chance this will ever happen. 

Crystal Mayberry comes to rent an apartment Belle and her sons are being evicted from and, in a moment of charity, agrees to let them stay there with her. She is not yet twenty and is prone to violence, has been diagnosed with a variety of mental disorders, has an IQ of 70, and is fervently religious. The good she would like to do for people is always undone by her inability to maintain any semblance of a healthy interpersonal relationship. Mayberry, like Larraine Warren, gives a great deal of time, money, and energy to her church, with no net positive results. By the end of the book, she is homeless and prostitutes herself each morning to men on their way to work and spends the rest of her day at church. 

Lamar Richards is a Vietnam War veteran who lost both his legs below the knee due to frostbite the year before the book starts. He passed out and became trapped in an abandoned house after a drug binge. He and his sons live in one of Sherrena’s duplexes next to the Hinkston family. Richards is always behind on his rent and constantly trying to do maintenance work for Tarver, to catch up, but with no luck. His home burns down in the same fire which kills the daughter of his upstairs neighbor, Kamala. After this, Richards drops out of the book and readers never learn what happened to him, mirroring the transitory nature of people moving in and out of each other’s lives with no notice or explanation.  

Eight Hinkston family members live in Tarver’s tiny duplex they’ve christened “The Rathole.” Unlike many of the families in the book, they manage to stick together thanks to the efforts of Doreen, the family matriarch. Doreen had a stable life in a good neighborhood for years, but after Hurricane Katrina, she was overcome by the need to go to Louisiana to volunteer her help, beginning the slide into extreme poverty.

The family’s life in the duplex illustrates a point Desmond makes about the symbiotic nature of a home: tenants must take care of a house so they can receive the psychological benefits from living in a healthy environment. In the Hinkstons’ case, they are locked in a battle of wills with Tarver about who’s responsible for maintenance, with the result being that the house becomes more unlivable as time goes by, making the family more depressed and lethargic. In the last section of the book, Desmond provides a brief update: the family moved to Tennessee, where they had relatives, and began to flourish in a way impossible in Milwaukee.  

Larraine Warren is one of the white trailer park residents who is in the process of being evicted almost as soon as she is introduced. Her story demonstrates the way in which the family unit has broken down. Even though her sister, Susan, also lives in the trailer park, she refuses to help Larraine because of her perceived inability to handle money. In addition, Susan also convinces the pastor of the church they both attend not to help Larraine, either, another example where the theoretical social net provided by churches fails to help those in need.

When Larraine is evicted, she moves unannounced into her brother Beaker’s trailer while he’s in the hospital for surgery. He’s livid when he finds out, and although he lets her stay, he later moves into an assisted-living facility with no notice and gives his trailer back to the trailer park to make up for the back rent he owes for his lot. The last we see of Larraine, she is living temporarily with another trailer park resident, Ms. Betty, and after that she drops out of the narrative.  

Pam Reinke and her boyfriend, Ned Kroll, have four daughters living with them, although two are the product of her earlier relationship with a black drug dealer. Their story after being evicted from the trailer park illustrates how hard it is to rent when having children, even though this type of discrimination was outlawed in 1988. Most of the time, she is desperately looking for housing with a single-mindedness that blocks everything else in her life out.

It’s only when she and Kroll and their daughters finally do find a place to live that she is forced to face the life she has: her boyfriend is a racist drunk who demeans her half-black daughters and makes them march around chanting “White power!” Reinke knows this is horrible and considers herself a terrible mother but also feels trapped. She settles for telling herself children are resilient and informs the girls that Kroll is the devil.