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.