Evicted Project

A family living in a small and rundown apartment in Milwaukee faces various hardships, including financial struggles, unsanitary living conditions, and an unsympathetic landlord. They eventually move to a better place in Tennessee and find stability. The cycle of poverty in America is perpetuated by factors such as low minimum wage and low-quality housing. Raising the minimum wage and improving housing conditions are proposed solutions to alleviate poverty. All eight of us lived in 18th and Wright, three generations in two bedrooms. I was the head of the household, caring for my four children, three grandchildren, and our dog Coco. The house was too small. They always were. I called it the rat hole for a reason. Struggle was the only thing my family knew. Landlord debt, spousal abuse, shootings, and living in filth were common themes of my family's world. Lamar, the single father with no legs, is our neighbor. He's the only person I know in this new neighborhood. It was cramped living in the apartment. I slept with Natasha on a bed, which often led to restless nights. Through the hardships, we were always a family who liked to prank each other, especially on birthdays. Unfortunately, we have not been able to celebrate Christmas for quite some time. When Patrice moved in from upstairs, Sharina informed me that she had been pirating electricity. This bill set us back $200. We had no power in our kitchen for several months. We ate dinner out of cans and smelled the rotten food coming from the refrigerator. The electricity was the least of our worries. The apartment at this point was desecrated. The back door was off its hinges, the walls had holes, and the bathroom was filthy. The kitchen windows were cracked, and the whole house was dark because Patrice hung up thick blankets. Filthy clothes piled up, along with roaches living on the furniture. I, along with my family, saw this apartment as temporary. We immediately started looking for new places as soon as we moved in. The damages and roaches would be here when we left, and we were fine with that. Our old apartment was spacious, and we felt connected to the neighborhood. I interacted with my neighbors and kept peace in the area. We all pooled our money for that apartment and for our current one. I got a child support supplement and an SSI totaling $1,124. I never finished high school, and at an early age I had a leg injury. Everything was going well in our old house until 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. I had to do something. I went down to New Orleans to help families in need. Since the trip had taken rent money, my family fell behind. We had been loyal to our landlord, however, so he let us stay. Then a shooting happened outside our house, and DNS issued orders to our landlord. We were evicted within five days. Again, I see this apartment as temporary. I've searched the Red Book and called landlords. Our apartment is falling apart. I called a plumber, and they told me the plumbing was sensitive. Our sink got backed up, which led to our bathtub having concrete-colored water inside of it. The toilet was also barely working. My family had to boil water to take sponge baths and flush the water down the toilet. We paid the plumber $150 and took it out of the rent money. Sherina, our landlord, threatened us with an eviction notice. Sherina never seemed to care about the state of her units. Sherina had the right to evict us because of my daughter, Patrice, and because she was living as an unauthorized boarder. At the same time, I found out my other daughter, Natasha, was pregnant. I was thrilled while she was mortified. I began contemplating moving the family to Brownsville, where a family reunion was taking place. Natasha wanted to stay in Milwaukee with her boyfriend, Malik, but I did not care about him. While Malik was stepping up as a future father, men were still not a big factor to consider when planning the family's future. I was still looking for a new place when Sherina and Quintin returned from Jamaica. My social worker, Tabitha, called Sherina to try to get her to fix the plumbing. Sherina, of course, blamed it on us. After we had hired a plumber, the pipes once again backed up. Tabitha also made the mistake of telling Sherina we were planning on moving. Sherina immediately filled an eviction notice that would be on consolidated court automation programs, making it nearly impossible for any family to find a new place. I called Sherina and pleaded that we were not trying to move in the middle of winter, but maybe sometime in May. I told her I would pay the money, but she refused to accept it. I woke up on January 27th with a throbbing pain in my foot caused by the door slamming down on it. I had to go to eviction court downtown. When I arrived at the courthouse, Sherina was already in a bad mood. After talking for a while, we agreed to a stipulation. I would have to pay an extra $400 next month and $50 extra for the next three months. By February, I managed to clear my debt with Sherina because of the tax credits I received. At the same time, I found out about the fire at Kamala's apartment and the death of her eight-month-old baby. I just hoped something like this would never happen to my family because of the lack of sympathy they showed to Kamala and Devon, this being their second child they lost. I overheard the firefighters say that they did not hear smoke detectors when they arrived. Now, if this was just a world we live in, Sherina and Quinton would be liable for this. But Sherina is never going to be held accountable. The worst was all Sherina was concerned with was if she was going to have to cover anything. How could a woman whose old student just lost their home and daughter have no consideration for what that poor family was enduring? The next day, I took a stroll past a recently decimated house, and all I was left to observe was the horrid landscape of the charcoal wood beams and sharp jagged icicles dangling from them. Amongst this ugliness, the only beauty left were six lilies tied together in remembrance of the innocent child that was forgotten in the house and now in the world. Our apartment was in disrepair. The toilet was blocked up again. The kitchen sink was overflowing with gray water, and roaches were filling cabinets. I did not bother calling Sherina. I was behind on rent, so there was no chance Quinton, her husband and business partner, would have come to fix it. A plumber would be no use, as I would be helping Sherina, which was the last thing I wanted to do. Our family became detached from our house as the damages and filth got worse and worse. I stopped cooking and fell into a lethargic state. Our whole family was suffering. The kids' grades fell, Patrice slept more, and Natasha spent almost all of her time in her boyfriend's house. Trash and clothes piled up, and no one bothered to clean it up. Looking into my house, or as I like to call it, the shack, just reminded me of how poor our family was. So I simply gave up. We often went to the library to escape our house. The kids could play computer games, and I had the opportunity to look up houses online. I never did. Soon, Natasha had her baby and brought him back to the rat hole. We got out of Milwaukee. We finally moved to Brownsville, Tennessee. Life seemed to get better when we were there. We lived in a three-bedroom house. Patrice got her GED and went on to community college with the hope of becoming a parole officer. For once in my life, I had stability. I could not have imagined the life I had back in Milwaukee. Immigration is a brutal and inhumane process that tore our family apart. We were just strong enough to bring ourselves back up and escape the poverty cycle. The systemic factors that perpetuate the cycle of poverty in America stem from a host of problems. The first one, and the most glaring, is minimum wage. Drexel University reports that a true living wage that supports basic standard of living without food and housing insecurity will be between $20 and $26 or more per hour, depending on the state. However, end quote, the current federal minimum wage sits at $7.25 an hour, which is little more than a fourth of what is needed to support a single individual. Now factoring that most of these people living in poverty also live with other people, have children and families, $7.25 an hour at minimum wage is not nearly enough to support the community. Drexel University also reports that most of those receiving minimum wage do not have a college education. They do, however, have a high school education. The most foolproof way to get out of poverty is to have a good job, but to have a good job you need to have a higher education, but if you already come from poverty and don't have the money to pay for a higher education, then you can't get a good job, which means that you can't get money to afford the higher education. This problem is a vicious cycle that perpetuates the poverty, which puts people in a very difficult situation to get out. Those working minimum wage jobs also receive no employer paid benefits. Low-wage workers are significantly less likely to receive benefits such as health insurance, sick leave, fair scheduling, paid family leave, and others provided to higher wage employees. This means that people who are already struggling to pay for basic necessities now also have to worry about paying for their own health care insurance and other basic job benefits that seem standard to those in the middle class. Brigham Young University proposes to raise the federal minimum wage to $15. They report that immediate action is 100% necessary to support the health and well-being of families across the country. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour will immediately boost the income of the lowest-wage workers and support economic security. They also acknowledge that $15 is only a starting point and not the end towards a fair and living wage for all. However, it will help support economic security for those living in poverty. Second systemic factor playing into poverty in America is low-quality housing. Low-quality housing often perpetuates a cycle of substandard living conditions due to a combination of both economic and environmental factors. In many cases, individuals and families living in this low-quality housing lack the financial resources needed to invest in improvements and renovations, which can result in the deterioration of their property over time. In the case of Doreen, Sharina turns off her electricity when she is unable to pay rent. This leads to all of Doreen's refrigerated food, spoiling, and many other housing problems eventually accumulating. When problems like this begin to build up, they require money to fix them, but when a person is already behind on rent and there is no money to do so, these problems only multiply. Landlords like Sharina are not required to maintain a certain quality of living, and so situations like this are common. The most service-level and seemingly immediate solution is to have higher standards of living for these landlords. However, this would only likely decrease the amount of available housing and make housing even harder to afford. Low-quality housing is a hard problem to tackle, but the solution begins once again with stable jobs that pay stable wages and can help individuals support themselves. AmericanPress.org explains how local resources are often non-existent in low-income communities and how individuals are often alone in terms of supporting themselves. Local resources could help provide for all low-income residents, but not having them can have catastrophic events on said community. The solution for not providing local resources is to simply provide local resources. This typically begins with government assistance programs, but can also start with locals and different groups creating programs. Having such programs would help provide low-income areas with the tools necessary to build strong and healthy communities.