In Milwaukee's poorest black neighborhoods, eviction had become commonplace--especially for women. In those neighborhoods, 1 female renter in 17 was evicted through the court system each year, which was twice as often as men from those neighborhoods and nine times as often as women from the city's poorest white areas. Women from black neighborhoods made up 9 percent of Milwaukee's population and 30% of its evicted tenants.

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were evicted.

[...] He thought a kind of collective denial set in among tenants facing eviction, as if they were unable to accept or imagine that one day soon, two armed sheriff's deputies would show up, order them out, and usher in a team of movers who would make it look like they had never lived there. Psychologists might agree with him, citing research showing that under conditions of scarcity people prioritize the now and lose sight of the future, often at great cost. Or they might quote How the Ohter Half Lives, published over a century ago: "There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessties of life to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the effort ... The evil day of reckoning is put off till a to-morrow that may never come. When it does come ... it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the cradle by such incidents."

Pastor Daryl felt torn. On the one hand, he thought it was the job of the church, not the government, to care for the poor and hungry. That, to him, was "pure Christianity." When it came to Larraine, though, Pastor Daryl believed a lot of hardship was self-inflicted. "She made some stupid choices, spending her money foolishly ... Making her go without for a while may be the best thing for her, so that she can be reminded, 'Hey when I make foolish choices there are consequences.'" It was easy to go on about helping "the poor." Helping a poor person with a name, a face, a history, and many needs, a person whose mistakes and lapses of judgment you have recorded--that was a more trying matter.

[...] They say the foreclosure crisis started on Wall Street, with men in power ties trading toxic assets and engineering credit default swaps. But in the ghetto, all you needed was a rapid rescore coach and a low-income tenant hungry for a shot at the American dream.

Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience--this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision. "For a protest movement to arise out of [the] traumas of daily life," the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have observed, "the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable." This usually happened during extraordinary times, when large-scale social transformations or economics disturbances--the postwar housing shortage, say--profoundly upset the status quo. But it was not simply enough to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them--which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.

When people began to view their neighborhood as briming with deprivation and vice, full of "all sorts of shipwrecked humanity," they lost confidence in its political capacity. Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma--believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addiction, and other harrowing events--were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives. This lack of faith had less to do with their neighborhood's actual poverty and crime rates than with the level of concentrated suffering they perceived around them. A community that saw so clearly its own pain had a difficult time also sensing its potential.

[...] for the most part, tenants had a high tolerance for inequality. They spent little time questioning the wide gulf separating their poverty from Tobin's wealth or asking why rent for a worn-out aluminum-wrapped trailer took such a large chunk of their income. Their focus was on smaller, more tangible problems. When Witkowski reported Tobin's annual income to be close to $1 million, a man who lived on the same side of the park as Scott said, "I'd give two shits. ... As long as he keeps things the way he's supposed to here, and I don't have to worry about the freaking ceiling caving in, I don't care."

Most renters in Milwaukee thought highly of their landlord. Who had time to protest inequality when you were trying to get the roten spot in your floorboard patched before your daughter put her foot in it again? Who cared what the landlord was making as long as he was willing to work with you until you got back on your feet? There was always something worse than the trailer park, always room to drop lower. Residents were reminded of this when the whole park was threatened with eviction, and they felt it again when men from Bieck Management began collecting rents.

[...] What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department's own rules presented battered women with a devil's bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction.

Before her eviction, Beaker had asked Larraine why she didn't just sell her jewelry and pay Tobin. "Of course I'm not going to do that," she said. "I worked way too hard for me to sell my jewelry. ... I'm not going to sell my life savings because I'm homeless or I got evicted." It wasn't like she had just stumbled into a pit and would soon climb out. Larraine imagined she would be poor and rent-strapped forever. And if that was to be her lot in life, she might as well have a little jewelry to show for it. She wanted a new television, not some worn and boxy thing inherited from Lane and Susan. She wanted a bed no one else had slept in. She loved perfume and could tell you what a woman was wearing after passing her on the sidewalk. "Even people like myself," Larraine said, "we deserve, too, something brand-new."

[...]

To Sammy, Pastor Daryl, and others, Larraine was poor because she threw money away. But the reverse was more true. Larraine threw money away because she was poor.

[...]

People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They might buy lobster on food stamps.

If Larraine spent her money unwisely, it was not because her benefits left her with so much but because they left her with so little. She paid the price for her lobster dinner. She had to eat pantry food the rest of the month. Some days, she simply went hungry. It was worth it. "I'm satisfied with what I had," she said. "And I'm willing to eat noodles for the rest of the month because of it."

[...] A healthy chunk of Crystal's money also went into the offering basket the first Sunday of every month.

"I'm sowing seeds," Crystal said [...]

Vanetta held her chilled look. "That's why I don't creep with your church, 'cause they don't have nothing to offer you, but they got a lot to say. [...]"