Tired, poor huddled masses
A hard looking kid dressed in a new fancy-name jacket held up a corner of the building opposite from the one Jack crouched on. Five stories up, Jack could see his silhouette pretty well from the lone street light halfway down the block. The kid, and the four menacing figures ranged around him in doorways of rundown brick buildings, were ‘taking care of business‘. Even the cold couldn’t put a damper on the need to score that last hit. Cars made a slow but steady cash flow trickle as Jack watched them ease to a stop at the corner. A few seconds to exchange tiny baggies for folded paper, and then back to lean against something and wait for the next.

He scanned the gloomy black of the neighborhood. It was a narrow cut of a street through three blocks of extreme poverty. All late 1800s brownstones converted into tiny apartments in the Depression, and in such disrepair that it would take more to renovate than any developer would consider, especially in this area. It would be more profitable to tear down and rebuild. This had once been an exclusive enclave of the rich and snobbish. Now there were shattered columns and smoke stains. Boarded up windows. Rats running through the walls. Plumbing that was closer to outhouses than usable bathrooms. Inside were marble walls and floors, cracked and stained. Ceilings low from water bloat and mold. Maybe it was kinder to get the people out of here but first they needed some place to go.

A round of eviction notices were still tacked up on many of the doors, but Jack figured it wouldn’t be enough. He noticed them on his first visit, and out of curiosity tracked down the owners through public records. All three blocks were bought at HUD sales over the last five years by two development companies, despite the companies’ history of housing code violations.

And that was probably what had brought him back the last three nights. There was something in the air along with the human stench and damp. It made his skin itchy. There were more tough looking guys on the street this week. He’d heard about eviction gangs that cleared buildings. Not always legal, but the legal system moved so slowly and it took only one well placed wrecking ball to bring down a structure. People with nowhere to go were notoriously hard to get rid of by shady landlords.

As he crouched in the deeper shadow of the roof, he heard yelling from the floor below.