renting

The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. 10 After the numbers were released, Milwaukee__ chief of police appeared on the local news and puzzled over the fact that many victims had never contacted the police for help. A nightly news reporter summed up the chief__ views: __e believes that if police were contacted more often, that victims would have the tools to prevent fatal situations from occurring in the future._ What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department__ own rules presented battered women with a devil__ bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction.

For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetually behind; and many poor tenants would be perpetually behind because their rent was too high.

The Hinkstons expected more of their landlord for the money they were paying her. Rent was their biggest expense by far, and they wanted a decent and functional home in return. They wanted things to be fixed when they broke. But if Sherrena wasn__ going to repair her own property, neither were they. The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house.

It was not that low-income renters didn__ know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them.

Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on.

Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They __elped get rid of the riffraff,_ some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.In years past, renters opposed landlords and saw themselves as a __lass_ 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 __rice 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__ strongest to this day.Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience__his kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision.

If you count all forms of involuntary displacement__ormal and informal evictions, landlord foreclosures, building condemnations__ou discover that between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move.

When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond_by neglecting repairs. Or as Sherrena put it to tenants: __f I give you a break, you give me a break._ Tenants could trade their dignity and children__ health for a roof over their head. 13 Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem. 14 More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems__s were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did_not. Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted. But from a business point of view, this arrangement could be lucrative.

An idle mind is a devil__ workshop and I am prone to renting out my mind to the first bidder.

Arleen__ children did not always have a home. They did not always have food. Arleen was not always able to offer them stability; stability cost too much. She was not always able to protect them from dangerous streets; those streets were her streets. Arleen sacrificed for her boys, fed them as best she could, clothed them with what she had. But when they wanted more than she could give, she had ways, some subtle, others not, of telling them they didn__ deserve it.