Evicted Major Figures

Sherrena Tarver

Sherrena Tarver is one of two landlords who are featured in the book. She and her husband, Quentin, own about three dozen rental units on Milwaukee’s South Side. Most of Sherrena’s tenants are poor Black residents who receive welfare, government Supplemental Security Income (SSI) disability payments, or housing vouchers. She makes about $10,000 a month in profit from her rentals.

Sherrena is a Black woman who feels she knows the poor Black community and how to make a profit from it. She is unashamed about her business model, which involves making money from other people’s failures: buying up foreclosed properties, renting them to people whose welfare checks barely cover the rent, and using the threat of eviction to stifle her tenants’ complaints about the condition of the units. She also allows her tenants to trade work for some of their rent or to pay back rent, often offering them a small discount for a large amount of work. Although Sherrena sometimes seems kind—taking tenants groceries or allowing a late rent payment—she does not hesitate to evict them if they don’t pan out as a source of income.

Tobin Charney

Tobin Charney is one of two landlords featured in the book. He is a 71-year-old white man and the owner of College Mobile Home Park. This is a trailer park on the far South Side of Milwaukee—the part of town occupied by many of the city’s poor white people. However, he lives over an hour away, in Illinois, so the park’s day-to-day affairs are managed by long-time tenant Lenny and an administrative assistant called “Office Susie.”

Tobin charges low rents, but even these are high in relation to many tenants’ incomes. Many tenants are behind on rent, and Tobin evicts some each month. He has no incentive to lower rents or work with tenants because the demand for cheap housing is high and he is making a tidy profit from the park—nearly $450,000 per year. Some of the profit comes because of poor management and shady dealing. For example, when tenants move out, they often leave their mobile homes behind. Tobin then lets new tenants live in the mobile homes for free provided they do their own maintenance. But he still charges them rent on the lot. In this way, he gets out of doing the maintenance and repairs the homes desperately need. Eventually, the city notices the state of the homes and decides not to renew Tobin’s license to rent. Tobin sells the trailer park.

Arleen Bell

Arleen Bell is a Black woman who is evicted multiple times and moves frequently, along with two of her children, Jori and Jafaris. For a time, she is one of Sherrena’s tenants, but Sherrena eventually evicts her. Arleen struggles to meet her children’s needs, especially Jafaris’s, whose asthma requires daily medication and whose behavior at school is concerning.

Arleen’s story highlights the collateral damage of evictions. She moves so often that her children switch schools multiple times in a year and reminder notices for important appointments are mailed to old addresses. The constant moving causes stress for her sons, who act out at school. Missed appointments lead to reduced welfare benefits. And she has difficulty finding new apartments due to her record of multiple evictions. As a result, her life is increasingly unstable, and her search for the next place to live is constant and time-consuming.

Larraine

Larraine is a middle-aged white woman who lives in a mobile home at College Mobile Home Park, which costs her nearly 80% of her monthly income. She’s a high-school dropout with two daughters. After her boyfriend died in prison, she began a downward spiral into dire poverty. She is a religious person, yet her pastor is reluctant to help her because he believes her poverty is her own fault.

She makes decisions that worsen her situation and that play into a narrative that the poor are poor because they make bad choices. For example, she uses her food stamps to buy expensive food and then must eat noodles the rest of the month, visit food pantries, and sometimes go without food altogether. Desmond concludes that sometimes people in dire poverty make bad choices because they are poor. It isn’t their choices that cause poverty, he asserts, but poverty that causes foolish choices. In Larraine’s case, since she has no expectation that she’ll ever be anything but poor, she decides to get at least some pleasure out of life. So, she eats expensive food when she can.

Doreen Hinkston

Doreen Hinkston is a Black woman who lives in one of Sherrena’s rental units. Near the beginning of the book, her daughter Patrice Hinkston is evicted from a different unit in the same building and moves herself and her children in with Doreen. This brings the total living there to eight, and there are often others staying with them as well. It is crowded, and there are many issues: cockroaches, plumbing problems, and a broken toilet.

Doreen’s situation highlights the way substandard housing can remain in disrepair even though tenants still must pay the rent. For example, when Sherrena does not make needed plumbing repairs, Doreen pays a plumber to fix the plumbing, then withholds money from rent to cover the bill. Sherrena threatens to evict her, noting that Patrice’s presence in the apartment is in violation of the lease. Then, Doreen withholds rent in general and begins looking for a new place to live. Sherrena gets wind of this and files for eviction. Doreen must either accept a home in terrible condition or be evicted. In the end, Doreen and her family move out of state and start over.

Patrice Hinkston

Patrice Hinkston is Doreen Hinkston’s 24-year-old daughter. At the beginning of the book, she and her three children live upstairs from Doreen, in one of Sherrena’s rental units. Like her mother, Patrice complained about needed repairs to Sherrena, and Sherrena reluctantly made some of them but then became tired of the demands. When Patrice withholds rent money in hopes of having repairs done, Sherrena evicts her. She moves downstairs to her mother’s unit.

Desmond uses Patrice’s story to make the point that when people have stable, decent housing, they often become contributing citizens, more engaged parents, and better workers. After Patrice and Doreen move the family to a better situation in Tennessee, Patrice begins to take steps to better herself. She earns her GED. She begins classes at a community college. She’s able to do better because she has a home, not just a temporary shelter.

Pam

Pam is a white renter in Tobin Charney’s College Mobile Home Park. She has four daughters and a boyfriend, Ned, and becomes pregnant again during the period covered by the book. She has had a hard time finding rentals because she has an eviction record, a criminal record, and children. Desmond notes that many landlords do not want to rent to people with children.

Pam is a domestic violence survivor, and her life has been severely impacted by drug addiction. Two of her daughters are biracial children she had with a boyfriend who was also her drug dealer. He often beat her, and she eventually left. Her brother’s death due to heroin addiction left her grieving and broken, and it was after this that she got into a relationship with Ned. Ned and Pam are crack users and got caught selling crack. They spent time in prison. They are eventually evicted by Tobin and move in with Scott and his housemate, Teddy. This prompts Tobin to threaten Scott and Teddy with eviction, too.

Scott

Scott is a gay man nearing 40 who was a nurse until he became addicted to opioids and began stealing them from patients and using drugs at work. He is a resident of the College Mobile Home Park owned by Tobin Charney and lives in a trailer with Teddy, an older man in ill health. Immediately after losing his nursing license, he tries to get his life back together, going to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and staying clean and sober. He gets treatment for his addiction and for depression but often relapses. He does finally qualify for affordable housing and begins rebuilding his life. 

Scott’s story shows how poverty and housing instability affect a person’s self-perception, especially when they are in conjunction with job loss and drug addiction, which is common. As a nurse, Scott was someone who helped others; once he loses his nursing license, he feels unworthy and depressed. He gets “stuck” mentally and emotionally as well as physically. A happy future seems like an impossibility. So when he is able to live in a decent apartment, he begins to see life’s possibilities again. Desmond uses Scott’s story to underscore how providing decent housing to people can affect all areas of their lives and give them a new outlook that can lead to rising out of poverty.

Lamar

Lamar is a Vietnam War veteran and a tenant of Sherrena’s. He lives with his two teen sons and acts as a father figure and friend to several other neighborhood teens. Most evenings, he, his sons, and their friends hang out in his apartment, playing cards, talking, and smoking a little marijuana.

Lamar’s legs had to be amputated after he, high on crack, jumped out of a second-story window. Though he’s a double amputee, he is denied SSI, a government payment to help people with disabilities. He is told the denial is because he could still work. But unemployment for Black men in Milwaukee is high, even for the able-bodied. Lamar is unable to find a job. To make matters worse, because he does not have a job, his welfare payment is reduced. Lamar struggles to pay Sherrena the rent and is threatened with eviction. Then, when his apartment is destroyed by a fire, he must move on.

Crystal Mayberry

Crystal Mayberry has been in foster care since the age of 5 and, on turning 18, aged out of care and needed to find housing. She rents the apartment that Arleen Bell is evicted from but invites Arleen and her boys to stay in the apartment until they find a new place. Sherrena Tarver eventually evicts her as well, after which she moves into the Lodge, a homeless shelter, and makes friends with a woman named Vanetta. Both Arleen and Vanetta are temporary mother figures for Crystal     .

Crystal has several mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar disorder, and reactive attachment disorder, many of them stemming from her traumatic childhood. Her intelligence quotient (IQ) is estimated to be about 70. She becomes enraged easily, and her impetuous and often violent reactions make it hard for her to avoid eviction. She is impulsive with money, spending it on luxury items instead of saving it to pay rent or other bills. Yet she is also extremely religious and almost never misses a church service—often going several times a week and contributing to the offering even when she does not have enough money for basic needs. Even after she turns to sex work following a string of evictions, she continues to find solace in her religious faith.