Chicago, Illinois
The shelter staff woke everyone up at 6:00 a.m.—sharp. There were no exceptions, even for Martha, who was working the night shift at her security job until 4:00 a.m. By 6:00, she was up and struggling to get her kids to school on two hours of sleep. And then there were the bugs—big fat insects the size of cockroaches. She’d lived in roach-infested apartments before, of course, so she began to scrub the floors with bleach and Pine-Sol like her mother had taught her, until she learned that heavy cleaning wasn’t allowed in the shelter either. If the Pine-Sol didn’t stop, the staff warned, Martha was out. Other residents of the city’s shelter system had complained about the frequent thefts; one woman said that her most prized possession—her only photo of her deceased mother—had been lifted because it was in a gold frame.
The biggest problem for Martha was not the rules or the bugs or the thefts. It was the atmosphere. A spirited optimist underneath her street-tough exterior, Martha thought the shelter reeked of despondency and resignation. These were the last people she wanted her children around. She tried to feed her kids in their room to keep them out of the depressing cafeteria, but the staff accused her of starving them. She couldn’t be a good mother here, she decided.
“A shelter is no place for kids,” said Martha. “It’s like jail.”
Martha and her kids moved again.
Martha was her daughter Jajuanna’s hero—and the only person Jajuanna knew she could count on.
“Me and my momma always stuck together,” said Jajuanna. “She said no matter what, she would take care of me and get us what we need. She’s never put anything above us.”
Martha kept that promise, but it wasn’t easy. She was constantly on the move: scouting out vacant apartments in Cabrini, searching for whatever two-bedrooms she might be able to afford, trying to convince family members to let her and her kids stay. She often worked, even though it was difficult to hold down jobs as a single mother with young children. She cleaned rooms in a pay-by-the-hour hotel where people came to turn tricks or cut cocaine. She ran maintenance for an office rental space. She served pizza at Sbarro. She watched the security cameras in the Water Tower. (“I was a snitch” is how she described it.) Throughout, her pay was never more than $12 an hour—and sometimes much less.
Martha had always dreamed of having a son. After leaving the shelter, she gave birth to another daughter, Justice, and then a baby boy named Davion. He had milky-white skin as an infant, but soon grew into a dark, handsome child who loved to be hugged.
The family bounced from house to house.
“We slept at auntie’s house, at another auntie’s house, at uncle’s house, at our other uncle’s house,” remembers Jimmya. “We were moving so much, and I just wanted it to stop, but it didn’t stop at all.”
At one uncle’s house, they all shared one room, and everyone slept in the same bed—except Jajuanna, who sometimes slipped down to the floor at night because she hated being squished. Another aunt had a front room with a pullout mattress for Jajuanna; at a third relative’s, their cousin would crawl into bed with her mother, Martha’s sister, so the family could have its own room. Sometimes there was no extra room, so Martha and her children all slept on the living room floor. There were some places Martha refused to bring her children. Other places were safe, such as Uncle Darrell’s house, but they had to be careful to get there early enough, because he padlocked the door at night.
“When I got out of school, I always had to call my momma because I didn’t know where she was at and where I had to go,” said Jajuanna. “I just did what she told me to. But when she didn’t answer the phone, then I didn’t know where to go.”
Sometimes Martha was forced to split the children up. Sometimes Jimmya and Justice went to their grandma’s house; othertimes the kids could stay with their dads for a while. Wherever they went, the children had to listen to the adults complain and insult Martha. She should come pick up her kids, they said.
These words hurt Jimmya’s feelings. She wanted to scream, “What do you think, that I can’t understand the words coming out of your mouth?”—but she stayed silent.
Martha heard the complaints too, but there was nothing she could do. She had nowhere to take them. She herself was living in the back of her minivan. The relatives called and called, but Martha just lay down across the backseat and listened to the phone ring.
Homelessness in the United States looks like a lot of things. The most common—and narrow—perception of homelessness is of people who have been forced by circumstances to literally live outside, people like Dorothy and Rob, who constructed a small barricade out of blankets, shopping carts, cardboard, and plastic bags under the I-94 overpass in downtown Chicago. They’ve been living there “a minute”—they said—which in this case means about three years. Dorothy was barefoot. Rob carried one of the yellow we fix houses signs that have cropped up like weeds since the foreclosure crisis. On the back he scribbled, man in need.
A few underpasses away, a shirtless man wearing army fatigues paced back and forth, clutching a metal baseball bat in his left hand. He was angry and his eyes were wild. He didn’t need nobody’s help, he said. He was a veteran—he’d served. He’d been down here for a while. He is perhaps the quintessential stereotype of a person without an address: single man, veteran, slightly unhinged, possibly a substance user and threatening. If you only count people who are sleeping on the streets, in cars or in shelters, there are approximately 640,000 people in the United States each night without a home.129
This narrow definition of homelessness, however, obscures the vast number of people like Martha and her children who are forced into shifting and unstable living situations out of economic necessity. Moreover, this restricted focus often makes homelessness appear to be a social issue, one that is caused more by individual problems like mental disorders or substance abuse than by systemic issues like economic inequality or the for-profit housing model.
As Loyola University professor Talmadge Wright explains in his book Out of Place, categorizing people who have nowhere to live as a class that is altogether separate from those who are low-income “moved the political agenda away from issues of poverty, redevelopment, displacement, land use policies, job loss and other structural features of capital to those agendas generated by perceivable behavioral differences within a destitute population and the problems associated with creating better service networks” (emphasis mine).130
In other words, this narrow perception of homelessness makes it easy to pretend that it is these people—rather than the economic system—that are fucked up.
The Biggs family never looked “homeless,” not under the narrow definition anyway. Jimmya and Justice with the stick-skinny legs of growing girls, baby Davion who always wanted to be picked up, and Jajuanna who looks so much like her mother that people addressed them as sisters on the street—they always looked clean and well fed. But before they were even teenagers, the kids had lived in so many places, they couldn’t even keep track.
If you count families like the Biggses, people who are doubled up with relatives and shifting from house to house because they can’t afford a place to live, there are nearly seven million people in the United States without homes.131 Martha Biggs’s best friend, Trisha James, was also living in this type of situation: a small, in-foreclosure house almost entirely devoid of furniture and without indoor plumbing. On any given night, around ten adults stayed there, along with a rotating cast of their children. The last place James had lived consistently, about a year earlier, was an apartment funded by a city program. Her building was in foreclosure, although neither she nor anyone at the assistance program knew about the pending eviction until the sheriff came to remove James and her kids two days before Christmas. Neighborhood boys set the vacant building aflame a few weeks later—before James had even had time to come back and collect her things.
James is part of a growing phenomenon of chronic, intergenerational homelessness. She, her parents, and her children all go through life each day without stable or safe places to live. The family members struggle to provide for each other, and failure adds emotional trauma to all the other hardship.
James’s mother, Helen, is sick with untreated hemorrhoids that cause daily bleeding. Her goal is simple: “I just don’t want to die,” she said.
Yet what she speaks about the most is the feeling of not being able to provide for her children, and then not having them provide for her. The way she described sleeping on a bench during the Chicago winter had nothing to do with the cold or the physical danger.
“It feels like nobody loves you,” she said.
If nothing changes, it is likely that Trisha James’s grandchildren—Helen James’s great-grandchildren—won’t have a home either.
“There’s a generational curse on a person,” said Maime Fenner, the director a shelter for women and children on the South Side of Chicago, speaking about young people who grow up without stable places to live. “But it can be broken. . . . Somebody got to break it.”
Martha finally landed a good job at the Scott Petersen hot dog factory on the far West Side of the city. Established in 1927, Petersen is one of the few proud factories left in Chicago, although it is now owned by a Virginia-based company. Working the line, Martha earned enough to rent part of a two-family house on the West Side. Her landlord’s bank would soon begin the process to repossess the building and foreclose the property, but she didn’t know that yet.
One afternoon Martha’s kids called her while she was at work to say that Jajuanna had run away. Martha left her shift and rushed home. She knew she would be fired, but her kids came first. Jajuanna, however hadn’t really run away—at least, that’s how she tells the story. She’d merely gotten fed up with babysitting and had left to take a walk around the block without telling anyone. She was gone from the house for less than an hour, she estimated.
Martha lost her job. Later, when the family was evicted from that house by a squad of police officers, Jajuanna thought it was her fault.
That day wasn’t the first time Jajuanna felt responsible for things outside her control.
“I thought it was my fault we got put out of all those houses,” she said later. “It was only me and my sisters and I was the oldest, so I thought it just had to be us getting Momma kicked out.”
Jajuanna and Justice loved school because it was an escape.
“I love school more than anything,” Jajuanna would say.
She and her sister both felt at home in the classroom, because they were bright and excelled in their course work. Yet the two were lucky that they were smart and outgoing, because switching schools became part of their September ritual. By the time Jajuanna reached high school, it was her fifth school. Jimmya’s experience was even more hectic. By the time she’d reached sixth grade, she’d attended five different schools, including kindergarten, in only seven years.
The grades of most children suffer if they are forced to shuffle from school to school and struggle to find a quiet place to do their homework. But with their natural smarts and under their mother’s obsessive watch, Jajuanna and Jimmya thrived academically.
“I just did my homework in the car. Or at the house we were staying at. Or I went to school early,” Jimmya said. Jimmya’s sixth-grade teachers would encourage the school to promote her directly to eighth grade. By the end of Jajuanna’s ninth-grade year, she would have a 3.5 grade point average.
But no matter how much they loved school, their need for a place to live invaded everything. Even Jajuanna’s middle school graduation day was almost ruined. Jajuanna was a talented singer and she loved to perform. She’d been chosen to sing a solo of “Children Hold on to Your Dreams.” She was so excited; she knew she could hit all the high notes, and she was graduating with all A’s and B’s. But before the ceremony began, she broke down crying. Would her mom be able to come? Would she find a ride? Would something come up?
When she saw Martha in the audience, wielding a borrowed video camera and a wide smile, Jajuanna was so happy. Still, her sisters and brother weren’t there. Davion was with his father, and Jimmya and Justice with their grandmother. Martha hadn’t been able to get hold of them.
The performance was one of the highlights of Jajuanna’s life, even though her siblings couldn’t make it. She didn’t blame them for their absence; she knew they were all experiencing the same thing. Justice was also aware that her transient home life made being successful at school more difficult.
“When I was homeless, it wasn’t like I was dirty because my mom made sure I wasn’t. But then I was going to school with everything on my mind of what happened the other night—that yesterday I got to a house, but what about today? I might have to sleep in the car today. I might get a good meal today. But will I get a meal? Will something go wrong? What will happen? How will I get home today? Will he open the door at night? . . . When I was nine, it was so hard. I asked Momma, ‘Why we at uncle Dunny’s house so much?’ I asked, ‘Why did the police take over our house?’”
Martha Biggs calmed her children—and herself.
“We’re going to get something better,” she promised the girls.
As Martha’s dreams began to look more and more like fantasies, so too did Chicago’s promises for many residents on the South and West Sides. As in Detroit, the wave of foreclosures was creating deep systemic issues, and the worst was the crime. For some, it began to look as if Chicago itself was a city of dreams deferred.
“It’s like Iraq out here,” said a man named Jack, who was sitting on the front steps of a house in Woodlawn, a neighborhood on the South Side.
Statistically speaking, his comparison is apt, if not understated. Throughout the course of the ten-year war, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq has topped the number of murders in Chicago during only the four bloodiest years of war (2004–2007).132 In all others, it was safer for a young American man to be in Baghdad than in Jack’s neighborhood.
Woodlawn’s murder rate is lower than neighborhoods like Inglewood, and the vacancy is less than in places like Roseland, which Jack called “the Wild Hundreds.” Still, the neighborhood is pockmarked with vacant, burnt-out, and boarded-up buildings. On an average block there were about three vacant two- or three-story houses, and sometimes as many as six or eight—nearly a third of the street. On the homes that were occupied, many displayed a small sign tucked into the screen door: DON’T SHOOT, read the lettering superimposed on a child’s face.I WANT TO GROW UP.
Most of the foreclosed houses were already stripped clean of anything that could be sold for scrap, such as a Bank of America-owned two-family house where the plumbing had been torn out of the walls and the carpet was stained with watermarks. There were no signs of the bank fulfilling its requirement to secure and maintain the house except for a sign that read: ENTRY BY UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. The basement door was unlocked and wide open.
One house had a gaping hole where the exterior wall of the third floor belonged. Arson in vacant buildings was a growing problem for the Chicago Fire Department. In 2011, two firefighters died trying to extinguish a flame at a vacant, foreclosed building that had fallen into hazardous disrepair. In other cities, bank-foreclosed properties have posed lethal hazards, particularly when looters strip gas pipes only to learn that the banks had neglected to turn off the gas. Some houses burn; others explode.
Another house had a basement filled with piles of trash, clothes, dusty Hula Hoops and empty Cobra vodka bottles. It reeked of tuna fish.
“Did you know they killed someone in that backyard just this morning?” the next-door neighbor said. His voice lacked emotion; the shooting appeared to be an unsurprising occurrence.
The housing activists in Chicago brave enough to investigate these vacant bank-owned properties tell battle stories.
“There was one [vacant] house we canvassed in Englewood, and two weeks later a 16-year-old girl got shot in the front yard,” said Loren Taylor, who works with Occupy Homes Chicago.
Thomas Turner, director of a new nonprofit, Help House Chicago’s Homeless, remembers seeing the inside of one PNC-owned house.
“There were feces in the basement, urine, rolled up carpet,” he began. “It was abandoned for six years, so squatters and strippers had punched holes in the walls. There was no toilet, no tub, all the kitchen cabinets were torn out. The bedroom looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer and just started swinging. . . . I still see gang members on the front porch or rolling up real slow in the car.” According to his conversations with the neighbors, the former owner of the house had been an elderly man—eighty or ninety years old.
Another Chicago resident, Erica Johnson, provides a similar description of a vacant home: “There were clothes, books, broken dressers, little white drug bags, used condoms. . . . It was a little drug house, and they were probably bringing their girls up in here,” she said.
The banks are required to maintain and market their foreclosed properties, but they often shirk their responsibility, especially in minority neighborhoods like those in the South Side of Chicago. In April 2012, the National Fair Housing Alliance filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and another against Wells Fargo after a two-year investigation in ten cities revealed that bank-owned houses in communities of color were far less likely to have proper for-sale signs, cut grass, trash-free lawns, and up-to-code renovations. Homes in neighborhoods of color were, for example, 82 percent more likely to have broken or boarded-up windows. Cities have increased fines levied against banks that don’t maintain upkeep on their houses, but not a single bank has been held accountable for the murders and rapes that occur on their properties.
The problem extends far beyond Chicago. In Los Angeles, at least one home owned by Deutsche Bank became a brothel. The walls upstairs advertised the girls, whose names and prices had been scrawled in blue marker. Neighbors told a reporter that during the day, the girls brought in and out of the unsecured house looked like twelve- to sixteen-year-old children.133 In the suburbs, sophisticated indoor marijuana farms and organized crime syndicates are increasingly operating out of former million-dollar homes, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.134
On a tour of the crack houses in Minneapolis, certified building inspector Dorian Morris explained how a family’s home turns into a drug den. First, the bank forecloses on a home and the sheriff evicts the family if the residents haven’t already left. (In other states, the eviction is carried out by a bailiff, a constable or the police department, depending on local laws.) Once it is empty, the bank sends a contractor to seal up and winterize the house. Next, the strippers come in, sometimes gaining access by kicking in the small windows in the stonewall foundations of older homes, other times breaking the locks. They rarely rip the boards off the windows; those are secured by hex-screws, which require a special type of wrench to loosen. Inside, they strip the house of the copper wiring, the plumbing and sometimes even the furnace. The copper alone can bring looters anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar per pound. Outside, they tear the aluminum siding right off the house if they’re desperate. Finally, people dealing drugs—in Minneapolis, that means mostly crack—begin to use the house at night as a distribution center, since it’s already open. In places like Ohio, foreclosed homes more often become meth labs; in the suburbs of California, they are used mostly for growing marijuana.
Back in Chicago, the crime fostered by these vacant, foreclosed properties has grown so pervasive that, just after the city’s murder rate caused a scandal during the summer of 2012, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that the city would spend $4 million tearing down two hundred of the worst properties. To Martha, the announcement sounded like a cruel joke: pouring millions into tearing down buildings when thousands of the city’s residents didn’t have a place to live.135 After the Biggses’ eviction from the foreclosed West Side apartment, Martha promised her children that things would get better, but they just got worse. The family moved into another foreclosed building, and then, finally, into their old white minivan. Jajuanna was in sixth grade at the time. She remembers how everyone slept: “My mom and I got the front seats, so we’d let the seats down all the way back. But my legs would hurt in the front so sometimes I’d lie down all the way in the back seat and Jimmya would switch with me in the front. Davion and Justice would take the seats right behind the driver.”
Jajuanna hated that she couldn’t stretch out her legs, but everyone adapted as best they could. They learned that they had to stop giving Davion water after 7:00 p.m.; otherwise, he’d pee all over himself and the car at night. Martha stored golf clubs and baseball bats in the car, just in case. The rest of the family’s larger belongings she stored with friends or family members, who sometimes kept the possessions they liked best, such as Jajuanna’s and Jimmya’s bikes.
At night, Jajuanna watched her mother cry.
“She tried to hide it, and I acted like I didn’t see anything. If I was laying down in the car and I saw her in the mirror, I’d just act like I was asleep. She always put her hands on her face,” she said.
As the oldest, Jajuanna felt increasing pressure and responsibility for her family’s situation. Her younger siblings were too little to understand. They’d often cry to their mother that they wanted to go home, pleas that Martha didn’t know how to answer.
“I saw my momma struggle more than anyone,” said Jajuanna. “And making it worse was that she had all of us, and that she couldn’t go anywhere because she didn’t trust people around us. Mom just kept moving. We just kept moving.”
Finally, one night when Jajuanna was in seventh grade, she cracked. She took box cutters to her hands and wrists, making shallow slices in her skin. She’d heard about cutting from other girls at school, but she didn’t really know how it worked. She was aiming for a vein, she said later, but she missed. The next day, in the bathroom at school, she tried again.
“It was because of all the things we were going through. I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I thought it would be better if I were gone,” Jajuanna remembers.
Martha understood what had happened—and why.
“My daughter Jajuanna damn near tried to kill herself,” she said years later. “She’s got welts on her forearm because she thought it was her fault.”
Jajuanna began getting counseling at school. She also began to write, filling notebooks upon notebooks with poetry, song lyrics, and journal entries, which she shared with her teachers and principal, who wrote notes back to her. But the emotional support didn’t change the daily reality.
A year passed with little change. The Biggses continued sleeping in the car until someone called Department of Child and Family Services to report seeing children sleeping in a white minivan. Martha knew the kids had to be split up again. They went to live with their fathers or grandparents.
One afternoon, Martha confided in her friend Patricia Hill, a retired police officer who worked with the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign. Martha knew all about the Campaign; she’d grown up with the group’s founder, J.R. Fleming, in Cabrini. She’d heard that the group had saved Hill’s house from foreclosure, so Martha told Hill about the car, about DCFS, told her she needed to do something. Anything.
“How much do you want to do something?” the woman asked her friend. The Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign had been talking about a strategy to deal with all these families without homes and all these empty houses, a way to solve two problems at the same time—and take back some control of the neighborhood.
“Enough to not be sleeping in my car,” Martha replied.
Hill stared at Martha hard for a moment and handed her a set of keys.
129. National Alliance to End Homelessness, “State of Homelessness in 2012,” Chapter One: Homeless Counts, January 17, 2012. http://www.endhomelessness.org/library/entry/soh-2012-chapter-one-homelessness-counts
130. Talmadge Wright, Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 21.
131. National Alliance to End Homelessness, “State of Homelessness in 2012,” Chapter One: Homeless Counts, January 17, 2012. http://www.endhomelessness.org/library/entry/soh-2012-chapter-one-homelessness-counts
132. U.S. soldier death count: http://icasualties.org. Chicago murder rate from annual Chicago Murder Analysis report https://portal.chicagopolice.org/portal/page/portal/ClearPath/News/Statistical percent20Reports/Murder percent20Reports/MA11.pdf
133. Melisa Chadburn, “Banks Booting Families and Leaving Homes to Rot,” AlterNet, June 11, 2012. http://www.alternet.org/story/155734/banks_booting_families_and_leaving_homes_to_rot percent3A_a_tour_of_blighted_homes_in_los_angeles?paging=off
134. Norimitsu Onishi, “Foreclosed Houses Become Homes for Indoor Marijuana Farms,” New York Times, May 6, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/us/marijuana-growers-move-to-the-suburbs.html
135. Chris Barton, “Occupy Auckland Protest Speaks with Many Voices,” New Zealand Herald, October 29, 2011. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10762353