Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  3. I did not personally witness this event. The scene was reconstructed through interviews with Sherrena, Quentin, and Community Advocates social workers.

  4. Of those, about 1 in 7 had their utilities shut off. A family renting crumbling housing on a dangerous street paid less rent than an affluent one living in a swanky downtown loft—but their utility costs often were equivalent. In some cases, renters living at the bottom of the market paid more for utilities than those living at the top because they could not afford new construction with thick insulation, double-paned windows, or Energy Star appliances. Nationwide, renting families responsible for utilities with incomes less than $15,000 spend an average of $116 a month on utilities; those with incomes in excess of $75,000 spend $151 a month. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index, 2000–2013; American Housing Survey, 2013, Table S-08-R0; Michael Carliner, Reducing Energy Costs in Rental Housing: The Need and the Potential (Cambridge: Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2013).

  5. We Energies, whose service area extends beyond Milwaukee to other parts of Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, processes roughly 4,000 cases of theft every year. (Personal communication, Brian Manthey, We Energies, July 22, 2014.) See Peter Kelly, “Electricity Theft: A Bigger Issue Than You Think,” Forbes, April 23, 2013; “Using Analytics to Crack Down on Electricity Theft,” CIO Journal, from the Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2013.

  6. The moratorium applies to both gas and electric heating sources. The disconnection estimates come from a personal communication with Brian Manthey, We Energies, July 24, 2014. On monthly eviction trends, see Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 88–133, Figure A2.

  2. MAKING RENT

  1. John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee, 3rd ed. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2008 [1999]), 421–22; see also 416–18; Sammis White et al., The Changing Milwaukee Industrial Structure, 1979–1988 (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Urban Research Center, 1988).

  2. William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]); Marc Levine, The Crisis Continues: Black Male Joblessness in Milwaukee (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Center for Economic Development, 2008).

  3. Jason DeParle, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and the Nation’s Drive to End Welfare (New York: Penguin, 2004), 16, 164–68.

  4. State of Wisconsin, Department of Children and Families, Rights and Responsibilities: A Help Guide, 2014, 6.

  5. I did not personally witness Lamar’s interaction with his caseworker. This quotation is from Lamar’s account of the conversation. And I did not personally witness the painting scene. It was reconstructed through conversations with Lamar, his sons, and the neighborhood boys.

  6. Landlording is one of the last vestiges of family capitalism in America. Rental properties get handed down from fathers to sons, and it is not unusual to meet a second- or even a fourth-generation landlord. See Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Collier Books, 1961), chapter 2.

  7. A 1960s study found that 8 in 10 rental properties in Newark, New Jersey, were owned by people for whom rent contributed less than three-quarters of their income. George Sternlieb, The Tenement Landlord (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1969).

  8. This happened during a time when the entire American labor force grew by only 50 percent. David Thacher, “The Rise of Criminal Background Screening in Rental Housing,” Law and Social Inquiry 33 (2008): 5–30.

  9. Author’s calculations based on the Library of Congress call number HD1394 (rental property, real estate management). This idea is indebted to Thacher, “Rise of Criminal Background Screening in Rental Housing.”

  10. In 2009, the going rate for a two-bedroom apartment in inner-city Milwaukee was $550, utilities not included. The going rate for a room in a rooming house in the same neighborhood was $400 per room, utilities included. The profit margins of rooming houses often were better. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.

  3. HOT WATER

  1. In previous academic publications, I represented the trailer park under a pseudonym. I have used its real name here.

  2. Patrick Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1, 158, 176–77, 185; “Upside Down in Milwaukee,” New York Times, September 13, 1967.

  3. On the history of Hispanics in Milwaukee, see John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee, 3rd ed. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2008 [1999]), 260. On segregation, see John Logan and Brian Stults, The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis: New Findings from the 2010 Census (Washington, DC: US Census, 2011); Harrison Jacobs, Andy Kiersz, and Gus Lubin, “The 25 Most Segregated Cities in America,” Business Insider, November 22, 2013.

  4. This figure is based on the trailer park’s rent rolls from April to July 2008. (Lenny Lawson allowed me to copy them.) Because these arrears estimates are based on summer month totals, when nonpayment and evictions are highest, they are inflated.

  5. I did not personally witness this exchange but reconstructed the details by talking with Jerry, Lenny, and other trailer park residents. The quotation is verbatim in Jerry’s recollection.

  6. Later, Tobin would look for a way to evict Phyllis, who paid her rent every month. Lenny suggested giving her an eviction notice for having a dog. Tobin’s lease, with its faded and crowded type pushing forward in all caps over three pages, clearly stipulated: NO DOGS OR FARM ANIMALS ARE ALLOWED. But many residents had pets because Tobin and Lenny told them they could. “I’m kind of looking the other way,” Tobin would say. Lenny was suggesting they deny what was said aloud and point to what they had in writing. The lease also outlawed the consumption of alcohol on trailer park grounds.

  4. A BEAUTIFUL COLLECTION

  1. Throughout American history, city politicians have attempted to place checks on landlords’ power and improve tenants’ lives by laying down rules—from slum clearance to building code enforcement—as if the underlying problem were not America’s abundance of poverty and lack of affordable housing but disorder and inefficiency. This often brings unanticipated consequences that increase tenants’ hardship. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 1, The Growth of Ties of Dependence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 147; Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 135–45.

  2. One’s sovereignty over the land is expressed most powerfully in the act of banishment. Perhaps the first eviction recorded in human history was Adam and Eve’s. See Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 107–10. On the link between sovereignty and expulsion, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, 1968).

  3. The distinctly American desire to own a home is just as pronounced among the poor as it is among the middle class. Since the pioneer days, freedom and citizenship and landholding have advanced in lockstep in the American mind. To be American was to be a homeowner. As for tenancy: it was “unfavorable to freedom,” Thomas Hart told Congress in 1820. “It lays the foundation for separate orders in society, annihilates the love of country, and weakens the spirit of independence.” Cited in Lawrence Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 96.

  4. The nationwide vacancy rate for units renting at $300–$349, for example, fell from almost 16 percent in 2004 to below 6 percent in 2011. Author’s calculations based on the Current Population Survey, 2004–2013.

  5. Trailer park vacancy rates are based on Lenny’s rent rolls (April to July 2008).

  6. This event happened before my fieldwork, and I did not witness it. The quotation is based on P
am’s recollection.

  5. THIRTEENTH STREET

  1. In 1997, Milwaukee’s federal Fair Market Rent (FMR)—rent and utility costs that reflect the 40th percentile of the city’s rental distribution—was $466 for a one-bedroom apartment. If Arleen had rented that apartment, she would have had $162 left over each month. Ten years later, when the FMR for that same apartment was $608 and her welfare check was still $628, she would have to find a way to make $20 stretch over the entire month. FMR and welfare stipend data come from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development; Wisconsin Department of Children and Families; and State of Wisconsin Equal Rights Division. On the virtual impossibility of surviving on welfare alone, see Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997).

  2. In 2013 there were roughly 3,900 Milwaukee families in public housing and roughly 5,800 who received housing vouchers. There were roughly 105,000 renter households in the city. See Georgia Pabst, “Waiting Lists Soar for Public Housing, Rent Assistance,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 10, 2013.

  3. Adrianne Todman, “Public Housing Did Not Fail and the Role It Must Play in Interrupting Poverty,” Harvard University, Inequality and Social Policy Seminar, March 24, 2014.

  4. To make matters worse for the very poor, the shortfall of federal housing assistance has coincided with the emergence of an employment-based safety net, which directs aid to working families through programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit or public housing reserved for parents with low-wage jobs. The result is that families just above and below the poverty line receive significantly more help today than they did twenty years ago, but those far below the poverty line receive significantly less. For families living in deep poverty, both income and housing assistance have been scaled back. On spending patterns, see Janet Currie, The Invisible Safety Net: Protecting the Nation’s Poor Children and Families (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Robert Moffitt, “The Deserving Poor, the Family, and the US Welfare System,” Demography 52 (2015): 729–49. On the gap between housing assistance and need, see Danilo Pelletiere, Michelle Canizio, Morgan Hargrave, and Sheila Crowley, Housing Assistance for Low Income Households: States Do Not Fill the Gap (Washington, DC: National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2008); Douglas Rice and Barbara Sar, Decade of Neglect Has Weakened Federal Low-Income Programs: New Resources Required to Meet Growing Needs (Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2009).

  5. I did not personally witness this event. The scene was reconstructed through interviews with Arleen and Trisha.

  6. The Milwaukee Housing Authority’s general-occupancy list for merely poor families seeking assistance was closed and backlogged, but its lists for elderly low-income adults as well as those with disabilities were kept continuously open. The Housing Authority may deny even these applicants for any number of reasons, however, including if they have a criminal record, a drug problem, or a history of missing rent payments. Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, Admissions and Continued Occupancy Policy (ACOP), October 2013, Section 7.4: “Grounds for Denial.”

  7. As state services for the needy have been scaled back, social service agencies, like Belinda’s, have sprung up in poor neighborhoods across the nation to fill the void. Some are nonprofits; others are business ventures. Lester Salamon, “The Rise of the Nonprofit Sector,” Foreign Affairs 73 (1994): 111–24, 109; John McKnight, The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Jennifer Wolch, The Shadow State: Government and Voluntary Sector in Transition (New York: The Foundation Center, 1990). Urban ethnographies published during the 1960s and 1970s are striking in their lack of references to social service agencies. After reading these accounts, one cannot but arrive at the conclusion that social workers were not a major force in the lives of the urban poor fifty years ago. Carol Stack’s All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974) mentions but a single social worker and says almost nothing about child welfare services or similar agencies. And there are no job centers or employment counselors milling around Tally’s Corner, which Liebow published in 1967, a book (mainly) about unemployed black men. See Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967).

  8. When lawmakers reformed welfare, they required states to develop sanctions for TANF recipients, procedures that involved suspending all or some of their benefit if recipients were found to be noncompliant. When W-2 began in Wisconsin, nearly two-thirds of those who entered the program were sanctioned at some point during the first four years. Chi-Fang Wu, Maria Cancian, Daniel Meyer, and Geoffrey Wallace, “How Do Welfare Sanctions Work?,” Social Work Research 30 (2006): 33–50; Matthew Fellowes and Gretchen Rowe, “Politics and the New American Welfare States,” American Journal of Political Science 48 (2004): 362–73; Richard Fording, Joe Soss, and Sanford Schram, “Race and the Local Politics of Punishment in the New World of Welfare,” American Journal of Sociology 116 (2011): 1610–57.

  6. RAT HOLE

  1. For the full models and methodology, see Matthew Desmond, Carl Gershenson, and Barbara Kiviat, “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters,” Social Service Review 89 (2015): 227–62. Tenants represented in the Milwaukee Area Renters Study were classified as having experienced long-term housing problems if they suffered any of the following issues the year prior to being interviewed: (a) a broken stove or other appliance, (b) a broken window, (c) a broken exterior door or lock, (d) mice, rats, or other pests, or (e) exposed wires or other electrical problems for at least three days as well as (f) no heat, (g) no running water, or (h) stopped-up plumbing for at least 24 hours. To estimate the effect of a forced move on housing quality, we used doubly robust regression models that employed coarsened exact matching. Vouchered tenants were included in these analyses.

  2. While involuntary displacement by definition causes residential instability, the impact of a forced move on residential instability can last beyond the relocation immediately following eviction. Housing dissatisfaction is the key mechanism linking eviction’s direct (involuntary) move and its subsequent indirect (voluntary) one, as forced movers relocating under duress often accept subpar housing but then seek to move to better conditions. An analysis of the Milwaukee Area Renters Study that employed doubly robust regression on a data set processed by coarsened exact matching found that renters who experienced a forced move were 24 percentage points more likely to undertake an unforced move soon thereafter, compared to those who did not experience involuntary displacement. Additionally, 53 percent of renters who experienced a forced move followed by an unforced move attributed their latest move to a desire to move to a better housing unit or neighborhood, while only 34 percent of renters with two consecutive unforced moves did so. In other words, unforced movers whose previous move was involuntary were far more likely to cite housing or neighborhood problems as the reason for moving than were unforced movers whose previous move was also unforced. Not only do poor renters disproportionately experience involuntary displacement, but involuntary displacement itself brings about subsequent residential mobility. See Desmond et al., “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters.”

  3. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 31–32; Robert Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), especially 127, 146–47, 151, 177, 231–32. For an ethnographic take on the uses of public space, see Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

  4. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 271, emphasis mine.

  5. This strategy, if it was that, backfired when tenants didn’t report housing problems that bit into Sherrena and Quentin’s bottom line, like a running toilet.

  6. Landlords were required to disclose code violations before entering into a r
ental agreement with prospective tenants. City of Milwaukee, Landlord Training Program: Keeping Illegal and Destructive Activity Out of Rental Property, 7th ed. (Milwaukee: City of Milwaukee, Department of Neighborhood Services, 2006), 12; Wisconsin Administrative Code, ATCP134.04, “Disclosure Requirements.”

  7. Housing problems motivate a significant number of moves among Milwaukee renters. Consider “responsive moves,” which are neither forced displacements (e.g., eviction, building condemnation) nor completely voluntary relocations (to gain residential advantage) but something in between. Data from the Milwaukee Area Renters Study reveal that the most common type of responsive move among Milwaukee renters between 2009 and 2011 was that initiated by a housing problem. These moves accounted for 23 percent of responsive moves and 7 percent of all moves undertaken by renters in the two years prior to being surveyed. These moves were not motivated by a positive impulse (moving to a bigger apartment) but by a negative one (the need to leave units after housing conditions deteriorated). See Desmond et al., “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters.”

  8. As thousands of underwater homeowners learned when the housing bubble popped, defaulting can be far more rational than throwing money into a black hole. Timothy Riddiough and Steve Wyatt, “Strategic Default, Workout, and Commercial Mortgage Valuation,” Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics 9 (1994): 5–22; Lindsay Owens, “Intrinsically Advantaged? Middle-Class (Dis)advantage in the Case of Home Mortgage Modification,” Social Forces 93 (2015): 1185–209.