Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  7. Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011. The 2013 American Housing Survey asked all renters where they would move in the event of an eviction (Table S-08-RO). Most reported, optimistically enough, that they would move to “a new home.” But when you step from the hypothetical to the actual and ask tenants who have just received an eviction judgment where they are planning to go, most haven’t a clue.

  8. Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011.

  9. In Milwaukee’s poorest black neighborhoods, 1 male renter in 33 was evicted through the court system each year, compared to 1 male renter in 134 and 1 female renter in 150 in the city’s poorest white neighborhoods. By “poorest neighborhoods,” I mean census block groups in which at least 40 percent of families lived below the poverty line. By “white/black neighborhoods,” I mean block groups in which at least two-thirds of the residents were white/black. Because eviction records do not include sex identifiers, two methods were employed to impute sex. First, a pair of research assistants assigned a sex to each person—over 90,000 of them—based on first names. Second, with the help of Felix Elwert, I imputed gender by drawing on Social Security card applications for US births. Each method produced virtually identical point estimates. An annual household eviction rate was calculated by dividing the number of eviction cases in a year by the number of occupied rental units estimated for that year. Additionally, for each neighborhood (block group), I estimated the eviction rate for male and female renters by dividing the number of evictees of one sex by the number of adults of the same sex living in rental housing. All statistics were calculated for each block group for each year. The results were then pooled and annual averages calculated. For a fuller explanation of the methods used to arrive at these estimates, see Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty.”

  In an average year between 2003 and 2007, 276 court-ordered evictions took place in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, compared to 1,187 and 2,759 in white and black neighborhoods, respectively. Like women in black neighborhoods, women in Hispanic neighborhoods were evicted at higher rates. On average, in high-poverty Hispanic neighborhoods, 1 male renter in 86 and 1 female renter in 40 were evicted through the court system every year. Estimates that considered informal evictions and landlord foreclosures were even more alarming. Between 2009 and 2011, roughly 23 percent of Hispanic renters in Milwaukee were forcibly removed from their homes sometime in the previous two years, via formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation. This extraordinarily high rate of forced mobility—almost twice that of black renters—was attributed to the fact that the foreclosure crisis hit Milwaukee’s Hispanic renters particularly hard. When landlord foreclosures were excluded from the estimate of involuntary displacement prevalence, the percentage of renters who had experienced a forced move within two years fell from 13.2 percent to 10.2 percent. This exclusion caused the rates of involuntary mobility among white and black renters to fall from 9 to 7 percent and from 12 to 10 percent, respectively. But its biggest impact was seen in the rate of involuntary mobility among Hispanic renters, which fell from 23 percent to 14 percent after landlord foreclosures were dropped. Milwaukee County eviction court records, 2003–2007; Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.

  10. In poor black communities, women were more likely to work in the formal economy than men, many of whom were marked by a criminal record and unemployed at high rates. Many landlords did not approve the rental applications of unemployed persons or those with criminal records. In the inner city, women were more likely to provide the necessary income documentation when securing a lease, either from an employment check or public assistance like welfare. In Milwaukee, half of working-age black men were out of work and half in their thirties had done prison time—twinned trends not unrelated. WUMN, Project Milwaukee: Black Men in Prison, Milwaukee Public Radio, July 16, 2014; Marc Levine, The Crisis Continues: Black Male Joblessness in Milwaukee (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Center for Economic Development, 2008). Audit studies have shown that Milwaukee employers are more likely to call back white job seekers with criminal records than black job seekers with clean backgrounds. Black job seekers with criminal records are doubly disadvantaged. Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology 108 (2003): 937–75.

  If court records usually listed only leaseholders, it could be the case that women from poor black neighborhoods actually weren’t evicted at higher rates than men but were just more likely to collect eviction records than their male counterparts who lived in apartments off lease. Yet in black neighborhoods, a gender gap in formal evictions remained even after accounting for adults not listed on the lease. The Milwaukee Eviction Court Study (2011) accounted for all adults in the household, including those not listed on the Summons and Complaint. After doing so, black women continued to outnumber all other groups. They accounted for half of all adults living in households appearing in eviction court and 44 percent living in households that received eviction judgments. Black women were not only “marked” by eviction at higher rates; they were actually displaced at higher rates as well. A clerical tick did not explain away the high rate of eviction among black women.

  Another consideration: in the inner city, women had a harder time making rent than male leaseholders. Although many black men were closed off from the workforce, those with jobs worked longer hours and got paid better wages than black women workers. In 2010, the median annual income for full-time workers in Milwaukee was $33,010 for black men and $29,454 for black women—a difference equivalent to five months of rent for the average Milwaukee apartment. Many women in the inner city also had more expenses. This was particularly true for single-mother households, which made up the majority of black households in Milwaukee. Single mothers often could not rely on regular support from their children’s fathers, and because of their children, they had to seek out larger and more expensive housing options than noncustodial fathers, who could sleep on someone’s couch or rent a room. Sherrena rented her inner-city rooming house rooms for $400 a month (utilities included), a good deal less than the two-bedroom units Arleen and other single mothers rented for $550 (utilities excluded). With Milwaukee’s maximum occupancy limits in mind—widely interpreted as two heartbeats per bedroom—many landlords refused to rent single mothers smaller units. More heartbeats meant more bedrooms—and more rent. See City of Milwaukee Code of Ordinances, Chapter 200: Building and Zoning Code, Subchapter 8: “Occupancy and Use.” See Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty.”

  11. Manny Fernandez, “Still Home for the Holidays, When Evictions Halt,” New York Times, December 21, 2008.

  12. The “second cause” deals with unpaid rent; the “third cause” deals with property damage. In court, both causes are processed at the same time, leading to the legal lingo “second and third causes.”

  13. Between 2006 and 2010, Milwaukee Small Claims Court each year processed roughly 12,000 eviction cases but only 200 garnishments. I have excluded from this estimate garnishments in 2009, which for some reason were exceptionally high at 537. On eviction and garnishment filings, see State of Wisconsin, 2010 Annual Report: Milwaukee County Circuit Court, First Judicial District, 2. On garnishment and execution statutes, see Wisconsin Statues §814 and §815.

  14. In Milwaukee’s Landlord Training course, landlords were strongly encouraged to docket judgments. “The most important thing I’m going to ask you to do is to spend an extra five dollars and docket that judgment with the clerk of courts,” instructor Karen Long advised. “You want to add it to the credit report so that everyone out there knows that they owe you money….I’m asking you to do it for all of us who need to run credit reports on people….And also a couple years from now you might get a call, saying, ‘I’m George Jones. Remember me?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Well, I was your tenant three years ago. You have a judgment against me for seven hundred and fifty bucks. I need to buy this car. Can I give you five hundred bucks and you call it ev
en?’ ” Karen went on to advise landlords to tell tenants about docketing: “I’m going to put this on your credit report, and nobody is going to lend you any money or lend you anything until you pay me. So it behooves you, you know, to not let any of this go on your record.”

  15. Rent Recovery Service will report tenants to major credit bureaus even if landlords do not have money judgments (www.rentrecoveryservice.com).

  16. In Milwaukee and many cities across the United States, the law offers few protections for tenants in arrears. “It’s the ‘what’ not the ‘why’ that matters,” the landlord saying goes. In other words, the court typically does not care why tenants fell behind, only that they did. Arleen could have articulated her housing problems clearly; she could have brought pictures. Doing so probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Once, upon learning that an elderly woman being evicted had lived without electricity for a month because her landlord was slow to repair the wiring, a court commissioner replied, “That isn’t necessarily a fact we need to work out today.” Another time, a housing court judge listened patiently as a tenant described sewage in her bathtub and rotting floorboards. Then he responded, “You’ve told me everything except that you are current on your rent.”

  17. Tenants may have the right argument but the wrong presentation: too rough or meandering, too angry or meek. It would be naïve to think these considerations are uninformed by class, gender, and racial dynamics between tenants, landlords, and court actors. In the Landlord Training course, property owners are told, “The person who gets the loudest, and the noisiest, and the feistiest loses. So bite your tongue and go through it.” And even if landlords are new to eviction, many are educated members of the middle class, just like the court clerks, commissioners, and judges, who on account of their similar class position all speak the same language and speak it in the same way.

  18. Almost every landlord and building manager in Milwaukee that I met would agree. They felt that the court system was brazenly “pro-tenant,” that it resembled an “uneven playing field” tilted against property owners, or that commissioners liked to play Let’s Make a Deal when they should just be issuing writs of restitution. Lenny Lawson was the sole exception. The court system “used to be for the tenants. It’s not anymore,” he told me.

  9. ORDER SOME CARRYOUT

  1. According to Maudwella Kirkendoll, chief operating officer at Community Advocates (personal communication, December 19, 2014), 946 households benefited from the Homelessness Prevention Program in 2013. That year, the annual budget for that program was $646,000—all state- and city-distributed HUD dollars.

  2. The notice the Sheriff’s Office sends to tenants states, “movers will not take food left in your refrigerator or freezer.” Movers do not take food to bonded storage, but they do place it on the curb.

  3. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 129. On the psychology of scarcity, see Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having So Little Means So Much (New York: Times Books, 2013).

  4. After the foreclosure crisis, several states passed laws requiring landlords to provide tenants in foreclosed properties with advance notice, and in May 2009 Congress passed the Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act, which requires landlords who acquire property through foreclosure to honor existing leases. But when riding along with Milwaukee’s eviction squad in 2014, I met several tenants who simply did not know who their landlord was. The foreclosure crisis has caused urban rental property to be shuffled through many institutions, real estate companies, property-management firms, and private investors, leaving tenants bewildered. See Vicki Been and Allegra Glashausser, “Tenants: Innocent Victims of the Foreclosure Crisis,” Albany Government Law Review 2 (2009): 1–28; Creola Johnson, “Renters Evicted En Masse: Collateral Damage Arising from the Subprime Foreclosure Crisis,” Florida Law Review 62 (2010): 975–1008.

  5. Sheriff John and several movers told me about the eviction scenes listed in this paragraph.

  6. Results from the Milwaukee Area Renters Study revealed that while some low-income families suffer from “double disadvantage,” living in distressed neighborhoods and being embedded in impoverished networks, others, to put it plainly, live in relatively bad neighborhoods but have good networks and still others live in relatively good neighborhoods but have bad networks. Matthew Desmond and Weihua An, “Neighborhood and Network Disadvantage Among Urban Renters,” Sociological Science 2 (2015): 329–50. See also Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997), 189; Xavier de Souza Briggs, “Brown Kids in White Suburbs: Housing Mobility and the Many Faces of Social Capital,” Housing Policy Debate 9 (1998): 177–221; Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2012): 1295–335; Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 77–78.

  7. Jacob Rugh and Douglas Massey, “Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis,” American Sociological Review 75 (2010): 629–51; Signe-Mary McKernan et al., Less Than Equal: Racial Disparities in Wealth Accumulation (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2013); Thomas Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede, and Sam Osoro, The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide (Waltham, MA: Institute for Assets and Social Policy, 2013).

  8. According to Lenny’s rent rolls, the month Larraine fell behind, so did forty-seven other families in the trailer park. The least amount owed was $3.88; the largest debt was Britney’s.

  9. When I asked landlords what factors informed their decision to move forward with an eviction, they typically provided canned answers that had to do with only the financial side of things. But as I learned after spending a considerable amount of time with landlords, the reality was much more messy and arbitrary.

  10. Although unequal in status, male landlords and their male tenants, both having been socialized to the rhythms and postures of masculinity, could engage one another in ways they could each understand. Among landlords represented in Milwaukee’s eviction records, men outnumber women almost 3 to 1. Milwaukee County eviction court records, 2003–2007.

  11. I observed some men avoid their landlords after receiving an eviction notice, just as I witnessed some women confront their landlords after receiving one. But because of the powerful ways gender guides interaction, providing individuals with expectations about appropriate ways to behave, a woman who aggressively confronted a landlord commonly was branded rude or out of line. This may be why Bob Helfgott, a landlord of twenty years who owned dozens of properties in poor neighborhoods, believed lesbians to be difficult tenants. “The gay women,” he said with a sigh. “That angry dyke thing, it drives me crazy. They’re just terrible. Always complaining.” See Cecilia Ridgeway, “Interaction and the Conservation of Gender Inequality: Considering Employment,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 218–35.

  12. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 107, 110.

  13. Tobin and Lenny had had enough. But it is important to recognize that Larraine had nearly avoided eviction, as she had in the past, by borrowing money from a family member. Petitioning acquaintances, friends, or family members for help sometimes worked. But this was less often the case for black women. If black women “ducked and dodged” more than their white counterparts, the reason was that their social networks tended to be far more resource-deprived. Because white women tended to be connected to more people in better positions to help, they were more likely to avoid eviction. See Colleen Heflin and Mary Pattillo, “Poverty in the Family: Race, Siblings, and Socioeconomic Heterogeneity,” Social Science Research 35 (2006): 804–22; Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 88–133.

  14. I did not personally witness this event. The scene was recon
structed through multiple interviews with Larraine, Dave Brittain, some members of the moving crew, and other trailer park residents.

  15. Thanks to a new law (Wisconsin Act 76, Senate Bill 179), Wisconsin landlords now may dispose of evicted tenants’ things in whatever manner they see fit. They now have the option of removing tenants’ personal belongings themselves and are no longer required to store them. When the law was being debated, the Brittain brothers dipped into their personal savings to support constituents mobilizing against its passage. But they were up against big money. The Apartment Association of Southwestern Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Realtors, and the Wisconsin Apartment Association joined forces to support the bill they had helped craft. As one commenter put it: “This new law will benefit landlords and ‘good’ tenants. ‘Bad’ tenants (i.e., those that don’t pay rent on time…) will not like this new law.” See Tristan Pettit, “ACT 76—Wisconsin’s New Landlord-Tenant Law—Part 1: Background and Overview,” Tristan’s Landlord-Tenant Law (blog), November 21, 2013.

  10. HYPES FOR HIRE

  1. The declaration “I keep to myself” is commonly heard throughout poor communities. The practice of actually keeping to oneself is not commonly seen in those communities. Alexandra Murphy plumbs this tension in her paper “ ‘I Stay to Myself’: What People Say Versus What They Do in a Poor Black Neighborhood,” working paper, University of Michigan, Department of Sociology.

  2. Most work on the underground economy focuses on the drug trade or sex work. But for every kid slinging dope or every prostitute on the stroll, there must be dozens and dozens of formally unemployed men working for cash or reduced rent, preparing landlords’ properties. On the blurry line separating the formal and informal economy in American cities, see Sudhir Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).