Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  7. Support systems that arise organically in poor neighborhoods help people eat and cope, but they also expose them to heavy doses of trauma and sometimes violence. Bruce Western, “Lifetimes of Violence in a Sample of Released Prisoners,” Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences, forthcoming.

  8. Harvey Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 70.

  9. This finding is based on an ordered logistic regression model applied to the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. The outcome variable is political capacity. Respondents were asked: “How likely is it that people in this neighborhood would ever organize and work together to improve their community and their lives: not at all, a little bit, somewhat, quite a bit, or a great deal?” The primarily explanatory variable is a measure of perceived neighborhood trauma. Respondents were asked: “While you have been living in this neighborhood, have any of your neighbors ever: (a) been evicted; (b) been in prison; (c) been in an abusive relationship; (d) been addicted to drugs; (e) had their children taken away by social services; (f) had a close family member or friend murdered?” Answers were summed. The full model documents a significant negative relationship between political capacity and perceived neighborhood trauma, controlling for prior political involvement, tenure in neighborhood, neighborhood poverty and crime rates, and a run of demographic factors. See Matthew Desmond and Adam Travis, “Perceived Neighborhood Trauma and Political Capacity,” unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, 2015. On the perception of social disorder mattering more than disorder itself, see Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager, “Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (2001): 717–67; Robert Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

  10. During the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, respondents were asked: “What two words would best describe your landlord?” Two independent coders assigned a value to each word, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. Words like “slumlord” and “asshole” were assigned 1’s and words like “excellent” and “loving” were assigned 10’s. More muted critiques or compliments were assigned a midrange value. The coders’ scores were then averaged to produce an overall rating. The average renter in Milwaukee, according to this ranking, sees her or his landlord as a 6. Renters with extreme housing burden did not rate their landlord better or worse than other renters did. But those who experienced housing problems saw their landlord in a significantly more negative light.

  11. Tenants did bind together upon learning that the trailer park might be shut down; this was their “extraordinary moment.” But after that moment passed, things went back to normal. They did not question the rent, fight for better housing conditions, or assign a political narrative to evictions. Their quibble had been with their alderman, not their landlord. Once, tenants did circulate a petition. It asked for the removal of a woman seen as a snitch and general troublemaker. “We are asking that Grace in trailer S12 be evicted from the trailer park before matters get worse…” the petition read. “We feel the only way to resolve this problem is to remove her before someone resolves it, and we don’t need for it to come to that.” Forty people signed what came to be known as the Petition Against Grace.

  15. A NUISANCE

  1. Psychologists have shown that when self-preservation is pitted against empathy, empathy usually loses. See Keith Campbell et al., “Responding to Major Threats to Self-Esteem: A Preliminary, Narrative Study of Ego-Shock,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 22 (2003): 79–96.

  2. “Dot your eyes” means blacken them. “Scary,” when used in this way, means cowardly.

  3. Throughout the twentieth century, as America modernized and its police force grew, citizens were instructed to clear the scene, to line up behind the yellow tape. The right to pursue and punish wrongdoers would come to rest with the state alone. But in the 1960s antiwar protesters began bleeding from standard-issue batons, citizens were speaking out against police brutality in minority communities, stories of entrenched corruption were being broadcast, Watts was burning, and violent crime was increasing. Facing this gust of changes, Americans began growing disenchanted with the criminal justice system. The coup de grâce was delivered in 1974 when Robert Martinson reviewed 231 relevant studies and concluded in the pages of The Public Interest that “with few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.” “Nothing works,” politicians and criminologists sighed. Its authority compromised, the justice system responded schizophrenically, at once giving the police more power and resources while also bringing non-police actors into the business of crime control. On the rise and character of third-party policing, see Matthew Desmond and Nicol Valdez, “Unpolicing the Urban Poor: Consequences of Third Party Policing on Inner-City Women,” American Sociological Review 78 (2013): 117–41; David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Lorraine Mazerolle and Janet Ransley, Third Party Policing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  4. Reinier Kraakman, “Gatekeepers: The Anatomy of a Third-Party Enforcement Strategy,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 2 (1986): 53–104.

  5. Desmond and Valdez, “Unpolicing the Urban Poor,” Table S1. Mazerolle and Ransley, Third Party Policing.

  6. The nuisance ordinance has also been championed as an effective weapon in the drug war. But of the 1,666 nuisance activities listed in all citations distributed in Milwaukee between 2008 and 2009, only 4 percent involved drug-related crimes. For the methodology that resulted in this estimate, see Desmond and Valdez, “Unpolicing the Urban Poor,” 122–25.

  7. Here, “black/white neighborhoods” refer to census block groups in which at least two-thirds of residents are black/white. And “properties that could have received a nuisance citation” refer to those from which three or more 911 calls were placed within a thirty-day period. If most nuisance citations were addressed to properties in predominantly black neighborhoods, this was not so much because those neighborhoods were more crime-ridden as much as it was because they were blacker. The discrepancy remained even after controlling for crime rate, 911-call volume, neighborhood poverty, and other relevant factors. Imagine that two women called the police at the same time, both reporting domestic abuse. One woman lived in an 80 percent black neighborhood and one lived in a 20 percent black neighborhood. The landlord of the first woman was over 3.5 times more likely to receive a nuisance citation, even after controlling for the prevalence of domestic-violence calls made from properties and a neighborhood’s domestic violence rate. Desmond and Valdez, “Unpolicing the Urban Poor.”

  8. This might lead one to wonder if recent declines in domestic violence should be credited to the increasing criminalization of family abuse or to the proliferation of nuisance property ordinances that discourage reporting. See Cari Fais, “Denying Access to Justice: The Cost of Applying Chronic Nuisance Laws to Domestic Violence,” Columbia Law Review 108 (2008): 1181–225.

  9. Other landlords responded to nuisance property citations by discouraging tenants from calling 911. Some instructed tenants to call them instead of the police. A landlord running a living facility housing “persons with disabilities” posted the following sign around the building: STOP BEFORE CALLING 911 / YOU CAN BE FINED BY THE / POLICE FOR / NON-EMERGENCY CALLS / CALL [414-###-####] / ASK FOR DAWN. Other landlords threatened tenants with eviction or fines if they called 911 again. After receiving a citation, one landlord circulated the following letter to his tenants: “Tenants who place nuisance calls to the Milwaukee Police Department, or abuse the 911 system, will be fined…$50.00 PER OCCURRENCE.”

  10. Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Wisconsin Domestic Violence Homicide Report: 2009 (Milwaukee: Wisconsin
Coalition Against Domestic Violence, September 2010).

  11. Milwaukee amended its ordinance in 2011, shortly after I shared my findings with the Police Department, city attorneys, and housing lawyers. Now, citations explicitly state that “nuisance activity” does not include domestic abuse, sexual assault, or stalking. With this step, Milwaukee has joined a handful of other municipalities—Chicago; Madison, Wisconsin; Phillipsburg, New Jersey; and the Village of East Rochester, New York, among them—whose nuisance property ordinance forbids administering citations for repeated calls due to domestic violence. They are the exception to the rule. Will dropping domestic violence from the list of nuisance activities be enough to protect battered women from the ordinance? It will most likely not, for two reasons.

  The first is that domestic-violence incidents often hide behind other police designations, antiseptic and context-barren, such as Property Damage (as when an ex-boyfriend kicks down the door) or Subject with Weapon (as when a husband uses a pair of box cutters on his wife). Domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking were not struck from Milwaukee’s original list of nuisance activities; they were never included in the list to begin with. Because the ordinance still lists things like battery, harassment, and misuse of emergency telephone numbers among its thirty-two permissible nuisances, these designations can still be applied to crimes of the home.

  A second problem with the city’s quick fix is that it relies on landlords, who have been threatened with hefty fines, to reveal if nuisance activities are domestic violence–related. Some will raise this issue with the police, and others will simply evict the tenant, implementing their own quick fix. Roughly 8 in 10 property owners abated nuisance activity, regardless of what it involved, by evicting tenants or by threatening them with eviction if the police were contacted again. One could propose a list of other improvements—more police training could help; cities could aim their ordinances only at drug activity or noise—but maybe this is a case where the hatchet is preferred to the scalpel. Not only can nuisance property ordinances do considerable harm, but they also reveal the extent to which local governments are willing to relax civil rights and circumvent the judiciary process when confronted with a scarcity of resources. “Nuisance tenants” are not prima facie guilty. They are not prima facie anything because questions of guilt and innocence are inconsequential to policies designed to operate beyond the purview of the court. Unless the tenant puts up a serious fuss, the evidence never even sees the inside of a court. Besides these concerns about due process rights, legal scholars have argued that nuisance property ordinances violate constitutional (think Fourth Amendment) and statutory (think Fair Housing Act) protections. Perhaps what Caleb Foote said of US vagrancy laws almost sixty years ago can be said of nuisance property ordinances today: the only reason they are tolerated is because families struggling to make ends meet in the low-income housing market are simply too poor or too vulnerable to assert their obvious rights. See John Blue, “High Noon Revisited: Commands of Assistance by Peace Officers in the Age of the Fourth Amendment,” Yale Law Journal 101 (1992): 1475–90; John Diedrich, “Domestic Violence Victims in Milwaukee Faced Eviction for Calling Police, Study Finds,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 18, 2013; Caleb Foote, “Vagrancy-Type Law and Its Administration,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 104 (1954): 603–50; Karen Phillips, Preliminary Statement, Grape v. Town/Village of East Rochester, No. 07 CV 6075 CJS (F) (W.D.N.Y. March 16, 2007).

  16. ASHES ON SNOW

  1. I began this evening with Sherrena and Quentin at the casino. The scene of Lamar playing cards with Kamala was reconstructed through interviews with Lamar, Luke, Eddy, and some of the neighborhood boys. I also reviewed court records and reports by medical examiners and fire/safety scientists. The rest of the evening’s events were witnessed firsthand.

  2. Mothers’ cries were heard over a century ago, when flames ravaged tenements, the fireproofing of which was deemed too costly; and they went up throughout the twentieth century, when ghetto housing in city after city ignited in flame or collapsed in decay. In Chicago alone, between 1947 and 1953 fires claimed the lives of over 180 slum dwellers, 63 of whom were under the age of ten. Conditions that invited fires—overcrowding, slipshod construction—also could prevent families from escaping. Throughout the 1960s and early ’70s, some landlords torched their own buildings to collect insurance money. Sometimes these buildings were vacant; sometimes they were not. Today, children living in substandard housing are more than ten times more likely to die in a fire than those living in decent and safe homes. Said Jacob Riis, a fire at night is “a horror that has few parallels in human experience.” The quote comes from Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 88, but see also 35–36. On fires in the slum, see Jacob Riis, Battle with the Slum (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1998 [1902]), 89; Marcus Anthony Hunter, Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), chapter 3; Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 25–26; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 37; Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 335; Douglas Parker et al., “Fire Fatalities Among New Mexico Children,” Annals of Emergency Medicine 22 (1993): 517–22.

  17. THIS IS AMERICA

  1. On “going homeless” to receive benefits, see Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the South Bronx (New York: Scribner, 2004).

  2. Humans act brutally under brutal conditions. “People who have never experienced chronic hunger are apt to underestimate its effects,” the psychologist A. H. Maslow once wrote. “If they”—the well-fed, the housed—“are dominated by a higher need, this higher need will seem to be the most important of all.” So it is with so many thinkers and pundits who try to explain violence in poor communities without considering the limitations of human capacity in the teeth of scarcity and suffering. Look how neighbors, perfectly peaceful when the crop yield is plenty, will claw and trample and bite one another when bread is tossed from a food truck during a famine. Or as Maslow would put it: “It is quite true that man lives by bread alone—when there is no bread.” Ideas about aggression in low-income communities that do not account for the hard squeeze of poverty, the sheer emotional and cognitive burden that accompanies severe deprivation, do not come close to capturing the lived experience of people like Arleen and Crystal. A. H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50 (1943): 370–96, 387, 375. For accounts of human behavior under extreme conditions, see, e.g., Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Books, 1982 [1960]), 95; Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: First Mariner Books, 2009 [1990]), 64–81.

  People respond to structural conditions, like food scarcity or concentrated disadvantage, in cogent ways. The anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who popularized the notion of a “culture of poverty,” thought those patterned actions and beliefs themselves become sentient and help to reinforce the conditions that originally produced them. It is in this moment of sentience that those actions and beliefs are thought to constitute something like a “culture”—enduring and shared views and practices—instead of something more fleeting and circumstantially necessary. Omitted from this model are institutions that occupy a space between people and structural conditions and that encode disadvantage in people’s language, habits, belief systems, and practices. Resource-poor schools in low-income neighborhoods often leave children with subpar language and critical-thinking skills. Those deficits will remain even if those children relocate to safe and prosperous neighborhoods later in life. To think of those school-conditioned speech patterns and belief systems as evidence of a “culture of poverty,” the invention of poor families themselves, is t
o overlook the influence of broken cultural institutions through which low-income families pass. We do not think that the rich are rich because they invented a “culture of affluence” but because they pass through elite institutions that modify their behavior, habits, and worldviews, and this constellation of skills and ways of being, in turn, eases their entrance into other elite institutions. What might be viewed as a “culture of affluence” is, simply, affluence; and “many of the features alleged to characterize the culture of poverty…are simply definitions of poverty itself,” as Carol Stack pointedly observed in All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 23. On the culture of poverty, see Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959); Michèle Lamont and Mario Luis Small, “How Culture Matters: Enriching Our Understanding of Poverty,” in The Colors of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Persist, eds. David Harris and Ann Lin (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008), 76–102; Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond, The Racial Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), chapter 6; Matthew Desmond, “Relational Ethnography,” Theory and Society 43 (2014): 547–79.