As the pandemic makes an already terrible housing crisis worse, a new version of house-sitting signals a broken real-estate market.
Wandering around Northwest Pasadena, I pressed my face against the window of a dingy pink stucco house at 265 Robinson Road. It was April, 2019, and in two blocks I had passed thirteen bungalows, duplexes, and multifamily homes that had gone through foreclosure in the past fifteen years. Twelve of them were still unoccupied. No. 265 had been in foreclosure for a year and a half, and the two small houses on the property had long sat empty. But now, inside the rear house, there was a gallon jug of water and a bag of peanuts on a Formica kitchen counter. The walls were a mangy taupe, but African-print sheets hung over the windows. As I walked away, I heard a genteel Southern accent from behind me: “Can I help you?” A Black man with perfect posture, wearing loafers and a black T-shirt tucked into belted trousers, introduced himself as Augustus Evans.
I wasn’t the first person to wonder what Evans was doing there. A few weeks earlier, two sheriffs had knocked on the door around 11 p.m. and handcuffed him. In his car’s glove compartment, they found a letter of employment and the cell-phone number of a woman named Diane Montano, who runs Weekend Warriors, a company that provides security for vacant houses. Like many of Montano’s employees, Evans was homeless when he was hired. Now he lives in properties that are being flipped, guarding them through the renovation, staging, open-house, and inspection periods. In the past seven years, he has protected more than twenty-two homes, in thirteen neighborhoods around Los Angeles, almost all historically Black and Latino communities. A McMansion in Fontana; a four-unit apartment complex in Compton; a “baby mansion on the peak of the mountain” in East L.A., which had been left to a son who, according to the neighbors, borrowed so much against the equity of the house that he lost it to foreclosure. Before leaving, he poured liquid cement down the drains. Evans guarded the property as the plumbing system was replaced.
Empty houses are a strange sight in an area that has one of the most severe housing shortages in the United States. L.A. has the highest median home prices, relative to income, and among the lowest homeownership rates of any major city, according to the U.C.L.A. Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. Renting isn’t any easier. The area has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, and the average rent is twenty-two hundred dollars a month. On any night, some sixty-six thousand people there sleep in cars, in shelters, or on the street, an increase of thirteen per cent since last year.
The housing shortage was caused, in part, by restrictive zoning, rampant nimbyism, and the use of California’s environmental laws to thwart urban development. In 1960, Los Angeles was zoned to house some ten million people. By 1990, decades of downzoning had reduced that number to 3.9 million, roughly the city’s current population. Then, in 2008, the subprime-mortgage crisis struck, and in the years that followed thousands of foreclosed homes were sold at auction. Because they had to be purchased in cash, many of them were bought by wealthy investors, private-equity-backed real-estate funds, and countless other real-estate companies, leaving less inventory for individual buyers. In the end, the 2008 crash made housing in California even more expensive.
No. 265, along with thousands of other homes in L.A., was acquired by Wedgewood, a real-estate company, founded in 1983, that specializes in flipping homes, managing everything from lockouts and financing to renovation and staging. In gentrifying neighborhoods, empty houses are sitting ducks, so companies like Wedgewood hire Weekend Warriors and other house-sitting services for cheap security. Around Robinson Road, several properties had been broken into. At No. 265, a middle-aged Black couple had recently crawled in through the front window. When Evans told them to leave, they apologized; the man was a jazz musician, and they said that they were struggling with crystal-meth dependency and that they used to sleep in this house before Evans arrived. The three went to the front porch and chatted while smoking cigarillos.
Evans, who was sixty-seven at the time, took me through the two houses on the lot. He’d laid a blue tarp over the cream-colored carpet, and, in one room, he’d set up an inflatable mattress neatly made with a floral fleece coverlet. A Haitian-flag baby blanket was wrapped around his pillow. He liked his room warm; when he woke up, he’d crank up his space heater, then brew a cup of coffee and read and write—poetry, essays, screenplays—at a plastic folding table by his bed. He was contemplating writing a memoir. “This is how I keep my sanity,” he told me. He had the run of both houses, but he kept to this one room, his life contained in several milk crates on the shelves. He showed me his eighth-grade diploma and a picture of a poetry venue that he had opened in Compton in the nineties. (It closed after becoming a target of the Crips gang.) Two of his screenplays were on the shelves, along with a book, “The Thoughts of Augustus the Final Poet,” which he had self-published in 2014: “Hey, Mr. Income / You’re my best friend. / My pockets are empty / Where have you been?” He’d saved a receipt from the Los Angeles Unified School District, which bought two hundred and eighty-five copies for its classrooms.
He spent most of his time inside, but when he wanted a change of scenery he sat in his S.U.V., a 2001 Infiniti, which he’d bought with his house-sitting savings. Evans dreamed of living in the Robincroft Castle, a seven-thousand-square-foot historic landmark across the street, which sold for $1.39 million in 2016 and three years later was listed for $2.49 million. And he took to caring for a colony of ants under a tree, feeding them chicken bones. The bones disappeared quickly, so he kept watch and spied a cat and a possum come by, and realized they weren’t just eating the bones but the ants and everything else.
Born to sharecroppers in the Arkansas Delta, Evans is the seventh of ten children. He picked cotton until he was eleven, when his family hitched a ride on a hay truck to Tulare, California. In school, the other children and teachers ridiculed him—for his accent, his coveralls, his lunches of fatback and collard greens. He dropped out after the eighth grade. At sixteen, he and some cousins were washing cars at a gas station when a money-green Cadillac Eldorado rolled in and a Black man stepped out. One of Evans’s cousins asked the man how he could afford such a car, and he told them that, if they came to Los Angeles, he could hook them up with a job that paid two hundred dollars a day. That afternoon, the boys took a Greyhound bus to Venice, where they began selling little balloons of heroin out of their mouths for ten dollars each. Not long afterward, Evans offered drugs to an undercover officer. He was arrested and sent to juvenile detention, where he joined the Nation of Islam. His faith estranged him from his Christian family. “The old Muslim people, they brainwashed him, I think,” his sister Ercell Murray told me. When Evans was released, he moved to Compton, the heart of L.A.’s Black activist community. In the seventies, he sold Amway products door to door and taught martial arts. He wanted to open a martial-arts academy, but no bank would give him a loan. In the fall of 1983, when Derrick Stevens, a friend from juvenile detention, asked if Evans wanted in on a bank robbery, Evans said yes. “I never thought of robbing a bank, but I did know that that’s the building with the money in it, and if you got a lot of money you could do anything you want in America,” Evans told me.
On a late October morning, Evans, Stevens, and two other men walked into the American Savings and Loan on Crenshaw Boulevard wearing rubber masks of Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. The men bagged two hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars and several exploding dye packs, in what was then the largest bank robbery in Los Angeles history. (It inspired scenes in the movie “Point Break.”) Three months later, Evans was caught in Tampa, Florida, just before boarding a cruise ship to the Bahamas, where he’d hoped to hide. He spent the next seven years locked up, reading, writing, and preaching. When he got out, it was hard to find work.
In 1998, Evans rented a derelict office in South L.A., across from the Magic Johnson Theatre, to work on his poetry and various business projects, including a short-lived toilet-paper-delivery service. One day, he gave a CD of himself performing his poetry to a woman who worked in the salon downstairs; he’d noticed her singing to herself as she braided hair. “She was a vocalist out of this world,” Evans told me. “I mean, she’s another Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, Whitney Houston quality of a singer.” Soon they got married and he moved into her small apartment in South L.A., where they paid some six hundred dollars a month. They had two sons, and eventually, afraid that their children would become involved in the local gangs, they moved with Evans’s mother-in-law and brother-in-law to Moreno Valley, a suburb with a fast-growing Black population. They had another son, and, over the years, they rented homes that ranged from two thousand to four thousand dollars a month.
As the world eased out of the Great Recession, in 2010, his wife told him that their differences had grown too great. Although she had a talent for singing, she’d earned her nursing degree, but he was still holding on to the hope of becoming a famous poet. “You can’t just get stagnated and stuck on a dream that has not materialized,” she told me. After their divorce was finalized, he put his belongings in a trash bag and walked out, beginning a life of homelessness. He got two weeks’ worth of motel vouchers from General Relief, and when those ran out he headed toward Union Station, where he hoped to sleep on a bench. He was crossing Normandie and Vernon when a couple he knew from the Black-consciousness community spotted him. They took him into their store, a Caribbean gift shop called Bles-sed Love, and told him that he could sleep there in exchange for some help at the counter. There was a windowless black-lit room in the back, with murals of Egyptian iconography on the walls and the solar system painted on the ceiling. He slept there for nearly two years, waking at dawn for morning prayers and opening the store two hours later.
One morning, a customer told Evans that he supplemented his Social Security income by house-sitting for Weekend Warriors. There were two types of gigs, he explained: 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., which paid five hundred dollars a month, and 24/7, which paid eight hundred dollars. All you needed was an I.D. Evans called Diane Montano at around 10 a.m., and at 2 p.m. a van picked him up and took him to a house in Riverside.
The rules were simple: don’t leave, don’t host guests, and don’t talk to anyone—not contractors, property managers, real-estate agents, or prospective buyers. If you were working a 24/7, only short trips to the market or the laundromat were allowed. The premises had to be kept clean at all times, or pay would be docked. The driver supplied Evans with a mini-fridge, a small microwave, an inflatable mattress, and plastic floor coverings to protect the carpet.
The driver came by to check on Evans occasionally, always unannounced, photographing each room and sending the pictures to Montano, so that she could monitor Evans’s cleanliness and track the progress of the renovations. By the time Evans was living at No. 265, he had learned the rhythms of the gig. He knew that the driver wouldn’t come by at night or on Sundays. When he could, he’d steal out to Moreno Valley, an hour and twenty minutes away, to visit his sons. He kept loose change in a coffee cup in his car, and he’d give his youngest son all the coins he’d collected since his last visit. “They know Daddy has to work away from the house,” he told me. “They’re big boys now.”
Around the end of the month, the driver would deliver a check. In seven years of working for Montano, Evans has never met her. (Montano declined to comment for this article.)
At No. 265, two construction workers junked the decades-old kitchen appliances and Formica counters, tore up the carpeting, and laid down ash-wood laminate floors. By the end of June, the exterior was painted gray with slate-gray trim, the interiors a bright white. Shaker-style cabinets and granite countertops were installed in the kitchens. Edison bulbs hung from the ceiling in black metal light fixtures. Evans’s beat-up white microwave and mini-fridge looked incongruous. By October, the property was staged for showing, with wishbone chairs, reclaimed-wood tables, and woven wall hangings. In 2005, it had sold for four hundred and twenty thousand dollars; now it was listed for nine hundred and thirty thousand. A few weeks later, a termite tent went up to address bugs found during a home inspection, the final step in many L.A. real-estate transactions.
Montano told Evans to leave for a couple of days, to escape the fumes. Usually, he slept in his car (as does about a third of Los Angeles’s homeless population), but a strong El Niño had brought heavy rain to California. He accepted Montano’s offer to “bunk up” with another house sitter, in Compton, in South L.A., where the city’s rents are rising the fastest and where Black residents are most likely to be homeless. It’s also where many of the house sitters are assigned work.
Mansa Moosa-El opened the door and was surprised to find that his bunkie was Augustus Evans. “He has tremendous respect on the street,” Moosa, who was born Adrian Rhone, told me. He knew that Evans had walked with Louis Farrakhan in the early eighties, and he had seen him at community events. “I’m the fantastic immortal classic,” Moosa, who is forty-nine and was born in Compton, told me. “He’s the one and only golden oldie.” Whereas Evans dressed in trousers, blazers, and loafers, Moosa, a Black Panther, preferred a louder look: he wore a leather jacket, rose-tinted sunglasses, and African beads, and carried a staff with a black plastic snake coiled around it. Learning that Evans was house-sitting made him feel less miserable about his own situation. Moosa walked Evans through the small three-bedroom house, pointing out the lack of sinks, cabinets, hot water, and heat. The only thing that functioned was the toilet.
Moosa’s life has been shaped by L.A.’s demographic trends. As recent books like “The Color of Law,” by Richard Rothstein, and “Race for Profit,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, explain, a number of inner-city ghettos, like Compton, were formed by government policy. During the Great Depression, the government tried to enlarge the middle class by encouraging homeownership through the creation of the thirty-year mortgage. But restrictive covenants prohibited Black people from buying houses in certain neighborhoods, and further limitations were imposed by redlining, which barred prospective buyers in areas with large numbers of people of color from receiving federally insured loans.
During the Second World War, L.A.’s Black population almost doubled, as newcomers were drawn by factory jobs. Residents of Compton, which was then nearly all white, protested new housing for the workers. A large public-housing complex that had been planned for the neighborhood was moved to Watts, a racially mixed neighborhood nearby. “By 1958, it was 95% black,” Rothstein wrote in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. “Public housing policy was largely responsible for this segregation.” It wasn’t long before white people fled Compton, where Moosa’s parents bought a house in the early seventies. By then, L.A. had the fastest-growing Black population outside the Southeast, three-quarters of it concentrated in South L.A. Moosa’s father worked for the city, in the records library, and as much as a fifth of the Black population had solid manufacturing jobs. But, by the eighties, those jobs had disappeared or gone overseas. Moosa, like many Black Gen X-ers, fared worse than his parents.
The foreclosure crisis was ruinous to L.A.’s Black communities, in part because residents, after decades of being denied mortgages, had been disproportionately targeted for predatory loans and reverse mortgages. When the bubble burst, Black people were seventy-one per cent more likely than white people to lose their homes. Last year, Black homeownership reached its lowest rate since 1968, when housing discrimination was outlawed by the passage of the Fair Housing Act.
Even as renters, Black people are in a uniquely precarious situation. Jacqueline Waggoner, a president of Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable-housing nonprofit, and the chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Black People Experiencing Homelessness, told me, “When people are severely rent burdened, they don’t really have anyone to call. Their siblings or family members—many of them are one paycheck away from being homeless themselves.” A 2016 report found that white households in L.A. have a median net worth of three hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars; the figure for Black households is four thousand dollars.
The pandemic is making a terrible housing crisis even worse. For the first time in more than a decade, rents have stopped rising, but income has fallen precipitously. It is estimated that, among renters in L.A. County—a group that is disproportionately Black and Latino—at least three hundred and sixty-five thousand households currently don’t have an adult with enough income to pay the rent.
Although only eight per cent of Los Angeles residents are Black, Black people make up forty-two per cent of the homeless population. “I come from a pretty good family,” Moosa told me. “I grew up with a two-parent household, and I still couldn’t make it work.”
Like Evans, Moosa found himself homeless after his marriage fell apart, in 2017. In 2018, half of all unhoused people in L.A. County were homeless for the first time in their lives. A compounding factor for both Evans and Moosa was a criminal record, which made it harder to get a job and to pass credit and background checks. As a radical young activist, Moosa had served time for commercial burglary, possession of an explosive device, and assault and battery. His driver’s license had also been suspended. “Can’t be no Black Panther and follow all the rules,” he joked.
For a year, Moosa slept wherever he could: on couches, on someone’s laundry-room floor, and in cars and mobile homes that friends were trying to sell. He stayed until he wore out his welcome. “You can tell you have to walk,” he said. “Rather than make it all melodramatic, you better do that.” On April 1, 2017, he had a heart attack; a year and a half later, he had a stroke. (The average life expectancy of homeless people is estimated to be almost thirty years shorter than that of the general population.) When a doctor learned that he didn’t have a home, he was referred to a shelter.
Many of the people checking into the shelter were unbathed or mentally ill; the shelter felt like “county jail on the streets,” Moosa said. His younger brother, who had been house-sitting for a couple of years, shared Montano’s number. Moosa took a selfie and texted it to her along with a picture of his state I.D. Soon afterward, a driver picked up Moosa and took him to an apartment complex in Buena Park, an affluent area in Orange County. “I was, like, Yeah, all right, this is it!” he said. But as an outsider in white suburbia, without a car or money, he went hungry. After several days, he texted his brother, who drove him to a Wendy’s. Moosa took a sip of cold soda and his system was so shocked that his entire body began to shake.
“It’d be a lot of unpredictability and instability to it,” Moosa said of house-sitting. “There’s been times I feel like a turkey on Thanksgiving Eve.” If a property was listed for sale, he might find out at six in the morning, when a real-estate agent, wanting to beat traffic, arrived without warning. “I’ll be pumping a log, and they’ll come in before it hits the water,” Moosa said. “I’ll exit the bathroom and the Realtor is standing there, three feet away. ‘Oh, um, can we look in here?’ ”
The house sitters aren’t told who owns the homes they’re protecting, but it’s apparent when the “For Sale” signs go up: Wedgewood and its subsidiary, Maxim Properties, which are based in Redondo Beach. In recent filings, the company has reported buying and selling several thousand homes in L.A. County each year, and many more up and down the West Coast and in Florida. The company uses more than a dozen different L.L.C. names, many of which sound like ski resorts, such as Catamount Properties and Breckenridge. A significant number of its Los Angeles properties—and seemingly all of those assigned a house sitter—are in communities of color.
“Many of the neighborhoods that were redlined are seeing investment pour back in for the first time since they were redlined in the nineteen-thirties,” Braden Crooks, a co-founder of Designing the We, a design and social-impact studio that has staged exhibits on redlining throughout the country, told me. “But, because of this historic wealth destruction, because people lost ownership and are mostly renters . . . you don’t see the speculative investment that’s pouring back into urban and redlined neighborhoods lifting everyone’s boats. You see it washing them away.”
Wedgewood’s role in the housing crisis hasn’t gone unnoticed. The week before Thanksgiving, 2019, a group of Black mothers calling themselves Moms 4 Housing occupied a Wedgewood property in West Oakland that they said had been vacant for years. They washed the walls, installed a water heater, and set up their children’s bunk beds. Then they began paying the water and electric bills. Two months later, Alameda County sheriff’s deputies arrived in riot gear and removed them.
Shelter-in-place orders to minimize the spread of covid-19 have brought new attention to vacant houses owned by investors. The Alliance for Californians for Community Empowerment, which supported Moms 4 Housing, staged an occupation of vacant homes owned by Caltrans in L.A., and throughout the summer the group organized rent strikes and protests against eviction.
Mychael Lindsey, another house sitter, didn’t like how Wedgewood acquired properties from people who had lost them in distress, but he told me that he’d made his peace with it, and at least he loved how Wedgewood renovated them. “All of our signature houses have the pretty cream carpet, the gray wood floors that are really nice, that mix with the gray granite tops,” he said.
There was one house-sitting assignment that rested uneasily in Lindsey’s mind. A house in Compton that had been lived in by the same family for three generations was foreclosed on after the mother died. When Lindsey showed up, the family was still there. Rather than informing Weekend Warriors and calling the sheriff for a lockout, he decided to give them another week. He told his boss that the property was secure and that he could clear out the furniture himself. The family cried in relief when he told them. But, after the week was over, the construction workers arrived, and they had to leave.
I asked Moosa, as he stood smoking in the back yard, if it felt weird to work for a company that’s implicated in the gentrification of his neighborhood. “Hold on,” he said. “Man, wow. Does that shit feel weird?” He looked up at the sky, considering, and then snapped his head down. “No!” he yelled. “It feel like racist white folks still controlling my existence all the time, which is still the same reason why I don’t even vote!”
But Evans saw house-sitting as a blessing. “Unfortunately, I am one of those who need shelter of any kind, and I’ve got shelter with pay through the cold, raining months, thanks to Diane,” he said. The checks were often late, but they always came eventually, and he could concentrate on his reading and writing. “I get twenty-four-hour peace,” he said. His years in prison had accustomed him to solitude—he could sit there for ten, twelve hours a day. He tried to stay out of people’s way.
In November, 265 Robinson Road went into contract, and on a rainy Thursday in early December the new owner, a Black man in his forties, knocked on the door. He toured the house and told Evans that he would be moving in the next day. “All of this?” Evans said, pointing to his colorful African sheets and inflatable mattress. “It won’t be here tomorrow! It’ll be like I was never here.”
Montano had a new assignment for Evans: replacing a house sitter whom she didn’t trust at a condo that was under contract for three hundred and thirty thousand dollars in Panorama City, a predominantly Latino suburb. Intruders had left a large black stain on the carpet in the master bedroom. Montano told Evans to protect the property while the carpet was replaced. When he arrived at the beige stucco complex, a young man and woman were rolling a blunt on the front steps. Evans toured the premises: a living room with a fireplace, a dining area with a low-hanging light fixture. Upstairs were two bedrooms, with cream-colored carpet throughout. Evans put protective plastic on the floor of the smaller room, which had a view in two directions, and inflated his mattress.
At one-thirty in the morning, Evans heard the front door opening. He rose and walked to the top of the stairs and saw a man and a woman in their thirties. “Are you squatting in here?” the man asked, agitated. “I’m security,” Evans told them.
“Well, can a woman use the bathroom?” the man asked. “No, come on, let’s go,” the woman said.
The next morning, workers came to replace the bedroom carpet, and Montano texted Evans to tell him that he needed to be out by 11 a.m. He could bunk back in Compton.
For the first time in what seemed like years, it was Friday and Evans was off the clock. That night, he decided to go to one of the clubs he used to visit in his youth, order a Shirley Temple, and see some live music. But, before he could choose which club to go to, he got a text from Montano: the sale of the condo had fallen through—the roof was leaking and water was streaming into one of the bathrooms—and she needed him back there immediately. He got into his car and hoped it would make it back to Panorama City.
A couple of weeks later, at 9 a.m., Evans heard the front door open. A woman in her forties entered, with a bag full of recycling. She knew the smart-lock code and assumed that Evans was the boyfriend of the woman who’d given it to her. She’d come to take a shower. “A lot of times, when Diane hires someone, they’re pretty much homeless anyway, so they identify with the homeless and as a result they sympathize and break the rules,” Evans told me. “I can identify with the homeless myself.” Nevertheless, he told the woman that she had to leave. She walked to the complex’s trash area and began digging.
Moosa was fired from house-sitting in January, after a neighbor accused him of making racist comments. He told me that he had merely introduced himself to the neighbors, as instructed by Weekend Warriors. As the coronavirus began to ravage communities of color, his ex-wife agreed to let him move in temporarily with her and their children.
An early fatality was Evans’s ex-wife’s brother, whom Evans had lived with in Moreno Valley. He caught the coronavirus in a convalescent home, where he was recovering from a toe amputation necessitated by his diabetes. Evans called Montano and requested his house-sitting check so that he could contribute to the costs of the funeral—which the family still hasn’t been able to have. But the virus brought a measure of stability to Evans’s life. He’s been in the same home since January, when he was assigned to a duplex in Santa Ana. Construction stopped in March, after a truck deposited new appliances, which sat in their boxes unopened all summer. Evans didn’t mind the lockdown. “I’ve been quarantining for seven years!” he said. He began writing a new essay about the sort of relationship he sought, the type of woman he’d want to be cooped up with during a pandemic. It was inspired by a radio story on the recent rise in domestic violence.
Yet sometimes restlessness struck him. He bought two maps, one of the U.S. and one of the world, and taped them on the wall opposite his bed. He thought about getting a passport—“I always thought it was thousands of dollars, but it’s only a hundred,” he said—and looked up prices for flights to Egypt and Jamaica.
His memoir project had stalled around Christmas. He’d been trying to dictate the book into Otter, a voice-transcription app, but hadn’t had the heart to keep talking alone. I suggested that he invite his sons over to listen, but he shook his head. “So much of my history and my life I conceal, because I don’t need to have my children dreaming nightmares over their father’s story,” he told me. “My life, you know, is not an attractive life. There’s no glory in it. I’ve never been in the military. I’ve never been out of the country. The only thing that’s impressive is that in a few days—shoot, next week—I’ll be sixty-eight years old.”
He longed for a home of his own, where he could watch movies with his sons and be surrounded by the possessions that he was currently paying eighty dollars a month to keep in storage. His Social Security check was eight hundred and thirty-eight dollars a month; he couldn’t afford much. But, as a senior citizen, he thought he might qualify for affordable housing. He called three nonprofits specializing in housing for the elderly. All of them said that they had a waiting list of between five and ten years. The news gave him insomnia. In the middle of the night, he wrote:
One night, he asked me how to use Craigslist. We pulled it up on his phone. “What’s your dream neighborhood?” I asked.
“Oh, wow,” he said, marvelling at the idea of choosing where he wanted to live. “Culver City. Wait, no. Carson? Carson got too much pollution there. Long Beach.” There was a pause. “Damn. What neighborhood would I want to move into?
“Well, you know, I’ll just type this in, just to see,” he finally said. “C-O-M-P-T-O-N.”
He scrolled through bland bungalows on run-down blocks. “You know, they used to call that Chocolate City,” he said wistfully.
“You can’t even get a single for sixteen hundred dollars,” he said, trying to navigate the pictures. “I got to go sell me some books.” ♦
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