This story is full to the brim with injustice, and it is painful to swallow all of the revelations that these stories have to share. For instance, the reader learns that the African-American community is almost immediately targeted because of racial prejudice. Why is it the case that over and over again, overcrowded apartments remove African-American tenants first? Because the subtle prejudice among the landlords is that the property will be worth more the less Black folks live there. This injustice is hard to combat, but it should be enough to make any decent reader's blood boil.
In order to appreciate the full gravity of this tendency, the reader is forced to see the story from the point of view of one particular family. What did Arleen Bell do wrong to get herself and her sons evicted? She didn't do anything wrong. One might say that it is only racial prejudice to blame, because (as the book later explains), it is statistically more likely that Black families suffer in this unjust manner than any other ethnicity. They are lucky to find a soft-hearted business owner in Sherenna Tarver who lets them rent from her, understanding that they didn't exactly get a chance to get their things in order.
Think of it this way; suddenly, they are homeless, living in the streets in the Milwaukee winter. That is a serious issue when it comes to renting an apartment, because apartments want to see stable living situations before they give someone a place. That means that one apartment's capricious decision to evict a family could mean that family not being able to secure a future home. It is a demotion of status. The portrait is of a three-caste system where some can own homes, some can only rent, and some cannot even rent and are left without option. That is a horrifying reality, but it is realistic.
