Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  18. LOBSTER ON FOOD STAMPS

  1. Jason DeParle, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and the Nation’s Drive to End Welfare (New York: Penguin, 2004); John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee, 3rd ed. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2008 [1999]).

  2. On waiting as a lived experience of poverty, see Javier Auyero, Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

  3. Social Security Administration, Understanding Supplemental Security Income SSI Resources (Washington, DC: SSA, 2014).

  4. “When I write about this, it’s going to be a little hard for people to understand,” I said.

  “You’re going to put this in your book?” Larraine asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. They’ll say, ‘What is she doing? She just got evicted. She’s practically homeless. She’s living with her brother, and who knows how that’ll go. She just got out of a meeting to renew her food stamps. What on earth is she doing putting on layaway a fifteen-hundred-dollar sixty-two-inch TV?’ They’ll say that.”

  “Well, they don’t have to understand it. I don’t understand a lot of things other people do, but they do it.”

  “What would you say to them if they were sitting right here, and they were saying, ‘Larraine, why would you do such a thing?’ ”

  “I would say because I wanted to.”

  5. Some middle-class people can’t help feeling incredulous, even furious, upon walking into a low-income household and spotting a big-screen television or fresh Nikes by the door. Conservative think tanks and news outlets publish reports with titles such as “Are You Poor If You Have a Flat-Screen TV?” and Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What Is Poverty in America? Liberals try to change the subject to avoid talking about behavior they wish would go away. That fancy television in the ratty apartment? Those new shoes worn by the kid eating free school lunch? Their owners likely didn’t pay full dollar for them. You can take a nice television off a hype for fifty bucks and find marked-down Nikes at the corner store. The price tags in inner-city clothing stores are for white suburban kids who don’t know how to haggle. Next to that big-screen television too it is harder to see what is missing. You are almost as likely to find as many televisions in a poor household as in a rich one. But most poor Americans do not own a computer. When Larraine ate her special meal, she didn’t even have a phone. See Tami Luhby, “Are You Poor If You Have a Flat-Screen TV?,” CNN Money, August 13, 2012; Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What Is Poverty in America? (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2011); US Energy Information Administration, Residential Energy Consumption Survey, 2012.

  It is an old liberal tradition: ignoring the nastier, more embarrassing aspects of poverty. And because, to paraphrase Carol Stack (All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community [New York: Basic Books, 1974], 24), liberal commentators and researchers do not take a hard look at these aspects of poverty, they can only apologize for them. But as William Julius Wilson argued in The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]), 6, 12, “to avoid describing any behavior that might be construed as unflattering or stigmatizing” to poor people is to “render liberal arguments ineffective” because the American public wants answers to questions about that behavior. There are two ways to dehumanize: the first is to strip people of all virtue; the second is to cleanse them of all sin.

  6. Would people behave differently if they were provided with a real opportunity to break out of poverty? There is good reason to expect as much. Behavioral economists and psychologists have shown that “poverty itself taxes the mind,” making people less intelligent and more impulsive. Moreover, when poor families are provided with a meaningful economic uplift, they often respond by building assets and paying off debt. A recent study found that almost 40 percent of parents who received an Earned Income Tax Credit in excess of $1,000 saved a considerable portion of their refund and almost 85 percent used the refund to address debt. The expectation of ongoing refunds gave parents hope, and they responded by saving toward the goal of climbing out of poverty. See Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having So Little Means So Much (New York: Times Books, 2013), 60, 66; Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan, “The Shape of Temptation: Implications for the Economic Lives of the Poor,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, No. 15973 (2010); Ruby Mendenhall et al., “The Role of Earned Income Tax Credit in the Budgets of Low-Income Households,” Social Service Review 86 (2012): 367–400.

  7. Eviction is costly, often preventing tenants from saving up first-month’s rent and security deposit for a new place.

  8. The majority of public housing residents are either disabled or elderly. On the rise of elderly housing, see Lawrence Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 285–90. On the composition of public housing residents, see Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), chapter 6.

  9. The practice of denying housing assistance to people based on eviction records and other civil proceedings raises a number of serious concerns. As Larraine learned, court records can be inaccurate; they can display wrongful evictions; and they can reflect landlord discretion, which can have a disparate effect on certain groups like single mothers and victims of domestic abuse. On questionable standards of accuracy in civil court records, see Rudy Kleysteuber, “Tenant Screening Thirty Years Later: A Statutory Proposal to Protect Public Records,” Yale Law Journal 116 (2006): 1344–88; David Thacher, “The Rise of Criminal Background Screening in Rental Housing,” Law and Social Inquiry 33 (2008): 5–30.

  10. The poverty debate could do more to recognize the powerful effects of rejection on a person’s self-confidence and stamina. Applying for an apartment or job and being turned down ten, twenty, forty times—it can wear you out. Theories about neighborhood selection or joblessness often assume low-income people are more or less “rational actors” who recognize trade-offs and make clear choices. The reality is that many are “exhausted settlers” who accept poor housing in a disadvantaged neighborhood or a dead-end or illicit job after becoming depleted and disheartened from trying and trying and failing and failing. The shame of rejection not only can pressure people to accept undesirable circumstances today; it can also discourage them from striving for something better tomorrow. On the experience of rejection when job hunting for entry-level work, see Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapter 4; Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (New York: Vintage, 1999), chapter 3.

  11. Some months later, Betty received a letter from Tobin threatening eviction for boarding Larraine. Larraine responded by paying Tobin what he said she owed in back rent and court costs. That amount was twice what the court records said Larraine owed. This caused Larraine to fall so far behind with Eagle Moving that she lost everything she had stored with them. Her furniture, photographs, and layaway jewelry were bought at a public sale for who knows what by some bargain hunter or thrown in the dump.

  19. LITTLE

  1. Housing insecurity is an important source of employment insecurity among low-income workers. Applying matching techniques as well as discrete hazard models to the Milwaukee Area Renters Study data set with Carl Gershenson, I found low-wage workers who involuntarily lost their homes to be significantly more likely to lose their jobs. When we examined the effects of forced removal for renters with relatively stable work histories and those with fairly unstable employment, we found forced removal to be an actuator of job loss for both groups. Matthew Desmond and Carl Gershenson, “Housing and Employment Insecurity Among the Working Poor,” Social Problems, forthcoming.

  2. Consider Tina’s story. A single mother of three, Tina worked part-time for a landscaping company,
entering data and making customer-service calls. After serving her an eviction notice, Tobin began calling Tina’s work and threatening to carry out the eviction unless she paid him $600. (Tina claimed to owe only $100.) Fighting the eviction, Tina attended several court hearings, sometimes missing work to do so. While her case was still pending, sheriff deputies and an Eagle Moving crew appeared at her trailer. Tina’s teenage daughter held them off until she arrived and explained her situation. Tina began looking for another place to live but was turned away by several landlords on account of her open eviction case and poor credit. Soon, Tina’s job performance began to falter. Depressed and overwhelmed, she began calling in sick. At work, she began making mistakes, like forgetting to enter service calls into the system, which she attributed to the stress of her eviction case. One day at the office, Tina broke down sobbing at her desk as coworkers and supervisors looked on. A judge would agree that Tina was being overcharged, but she still was evicted. Afterward, she began relying on friends and casual acquaintances for shelter, eventually moving with her daughters into a house owned by a man who showed a romantic interest in her. His house was considerably farther away from Tina’s workplace, and her car was unreliable. This situation played a role in increasing her lateness and absenteeism. In late fall, Tina was laid off. Tina’s case reveals multiple mechanisms linking eviction to job loss. The consuming and disruptive nature of the eviction caused her to miss work and negatively affected her job performance. Moving under duress and with little control over her circumstances, Tina relocated farther away from her employer, which increased her risk of tardiness and no-showing. And her dependency on a casual acquaintance for shelter introduced a new set of interpersonal complications and demands.

  3. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 53.

  4. These mothers were writing to apply for public housing in Detroit between 1946 and 1948. Detroit Housing Commission, “Children Not Wanted”: The Story of Detroit’s Housing Shortage Victims Told in Their Own Words (Detroit: Detroit Housing Commission, 1948).

  5. Jim Buchanan, Fair Housing and Families: Discrimination Against Children, Public Administration Series, Bibliography, P1732 (Monticello: Vance Bibliographies, 1985).

  6. Mary Ellen Colten and Robert Marans, “Restrictive Rental Practices and Their Impact on Families,” Population Research and Policy Review 1 (1982): 43–58, 49.

  7. Edward Allen, “Six Years After Passage of the Fair Housing Amendments Act: Discrimination Against Families with Children,” Administrative Law Journal of American University 9 (1995): 297–359.

  8. Unlike with discrimination based on race or gender, most Americans do not even realize that discrimination against children is illegal. Rigel Oliveri, “Is Acquisition Everything? Protecting the Rights of Occupants Under the Fair Housing Act,” Harvard Civil Rights–Liberties Law Review 43 (2008): 1–64, 5. A report based on a nationwide sample of Americans found that the majority of respondents recognized discrimination based on race, religion, and ability to be illegal, but only 38 percent were “aware that it is illegal to treat households with children differently from households without children.” See Martin Abravanel and Mary Cunningham, How Much Do We Know? Public Awareness of the Nation’s Fair Housing Laws (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2002), 10. See also US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Live Free: Annual Report on Fair Housing (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2010). Fair Housing of Marin, Discrimination Against Families with Children in Rental Housing (San Rafael: Fair Housing of Marin, 2002); Gulf Coast Fair Housing Center, An Audit Report on Race and Family Status Discrimination in the Mississippi Gulf Coast Rental Housing Market (Gulfport: Gulf Coast Fair Housing Center, 2004).

  9. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.

  10. Ned might have been homeless and on the run, but he was still compensated, as W. E. B. DuBois would have it, by a “psychological wage” that involved disparaging black people. See Black Reconstruction in America (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1969 [1935]), 700.

  11. The weight of the shame, sociologists have long thought, explained why many relationships fell apart in poor black neighborhoods. Especially for jobless men, the indignity of facing your family empty-handed built up to the point where abandonment became the lesser disgrace. To stay in a committed relationship was “to live with your failure, to be confronted by it day in and day out….In self-defense, the husband retreated to the streetcorner.” Most single mothers had no street-corner reprieve. Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 135–36. See also Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson, Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

  12. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1998), 134; Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 276.

  13. Carl Nightingale, On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dreams (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 76–77; Patterson, Rituals of Blood, 133–34.

  In the days of slavery and sharecropping, black mothers and fathers often disciplined their children harshly “to prepare them for life in a white-dominated world where all blacks had to act cautiously.” Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrows: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 96. Later, during Jim Crow, black parents sometimes trained their children to be subservient and docile. “In low-class [black] families,” wrote one observer, “a child is taught that he is a ‘nigger’ and that he must be subservient to white people, since he must work for them.” A saying emerged among black families at the time: “It’s a white man’s world and you just happen to be here, nigger.” See Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 98.

  Today, poor mothers are less supportive, less emotionally invested, and less solicitous of their children’s needs, desires, and dreams. They give fewer hugs and tender fewer compliments. Mothers experiencing severe levels of economic deprivation hit and scold their children more frequently. The sociologist Orlando Patterson has gone so far as to say that “the parenting of boys and girls by the Afro-American lower classes has become increasingly abusive.” The standard explanation for these troubling patterns goes like this: poverty diminishes a person’s capacity for affirming and supportive parenting because it causes mothers to become irritable, depressed, and anxious. If parents are irritable, depressed, and anxious, that increases their tendency to be punitive and less supportive of their children. The cluster of disadvantages and traumas we call “poverty” can siphon a mother’s joy. But poor mothers are not the only ones who are irritable, depressed, or anxious. These conditions are not unique to poverty. What is unique to poverty is poverty. It is the experience of parenting in scarcity itself that impels mothers like Arleen to become harsh caregivers some of the time. Their barbed coolness is a necessary protection, a defense mechanism in the teeth of deprivation. Patterson, Rituals of Blood, 133. A vast literature connects nonsupportive and punitive parenting styles to lower self-esteem, aggression, and antisocial behavior in children. See Robert Bradley and Robert Corwyn, “Socioeconomic Status and Child Development,” Annual Review of Psychology 53 (2002): 371–99; Elizabeth Gershoff, Rashmita Mistry, and Danielle Crosby, eds., Societal Contexts of Child Development: Pathways of Influence and Implications for Practice and Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Vonnie McLoyd, “How Money Matters for Children’s Socioemotional Adjustment: Family Processes and Parental Investment,” Health Disparities in Youth and Families 57 (2011): 33–72.

  In the developing world, it is scarcity that pressures mothers of sickl
y infants to say that their babies were born “already wanting to die” and to soothe their indifference with the reassurance that “little critters have no feelings.” “Here,” the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes has written about a shantytown in Brazil, “good enough mothering can require almost superhuman effort.” Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping, 342, 128, 361.

  20. NOBODY WANTS THE NORTH SIDE

  1. I never personally witnessed maintenance men propositioning shelter residents, but Crystal, Vanetta, and other women I met at the Lodge said this happened. In subsequent interviews, Salvation Army staff reported having no knowledge of such interactions between their guests and workers.

  2. Institutions charged with managing the poor, those that brought together people with similarly pressing needs, were especially fertile ground for disposable ties. Welfare offices, food pantries, job centers, Alcoholics Anonymous clubs, methadone clinics, homeless shelters, even the waiting areas of eviction court—disposable ties regularly were initiated in such venues. On the role of organizations in network formation, see Mario Small, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  3. According to Vanetta, the seizures began after a day-care worker dropped Bo-Bo on his head.

  4. Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967); Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2012): 1295–335.

  5. From Vanetta’s court records and her own accounting.

  6. In its Admissions and Continued Occupancy Policy (2011), the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee states that it “is not required or obligated to assist applicants who…have a history of criminal activity by any household member involving crimes of physical violence against persons or property and any other criminal activity” (page 16).