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.