Evicted
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7. Most of what we know about people’s acceptance or rejection of racial integration comes from vignette studies that take place in a lab. These studies consistently find blacks to be strong proponents of integration and whites to be advocates of segregation. One paper found that most black participants reported their ideal neighborhood to be half black and half white, while most white participants said they would move from such a neighborhood. If you step out of the lab and watch families search for housing in real time, you see something different and more unsettling. White movers have strong aversions to living in black neighborhoods—but so do black movers. I never once heard a black renter voice a desire to move into an “integrated neighborhood,” although they would be contributing to racial integration simply by moving from a majority-black neighborhood. Instead, I heard them speak of a desire to “get away from these black motherfuckers,” as Crystal did. When Arleen was house hunting outside the inner city, she once said, “The only people I have a problem with is people my own color.” Natasha once said, “Black people don’t know how to act….If I had a choice, I would move out there [to the suburbs] too! Ain’t nobody want to stay out here, and you hear gunshots all the time.” In these sentiments you don’t find a (positive) desire for integration but a (negative) repulsion directed at majority-black communities. For vignette studies about racial preferences, see Reynolds Farley et al., “Stereotypes and Segregation: Neighborhoods in the Detroit Area,” American Journal of Sociology 100 (1994): 750–80; Reynolds Farley et al., “Chocolate City, Vanilla Suburbs: Will the Trend Toward Racially Separate Communities Continue?,” Social Science Research 7 (1978): 319–44.
8. Between 2009 and 2011, half of all Milwaukee renters found their housing through social networks, and 45 percent conducted the search themselves. Only about 5 percent of renters found housing through the Housing Authority or another social-service agency. With respect to renters who found housing on their own, roughly half of white renters relied on the Internet; an additional third found housing after spotting a rent sign. A third of black renters who looked for housing on their own found it through rent signs, and an additional third did so through the newspaper or other print media, like the RedBook. Fifteen percent looked online. For most black renters, looking for apartments was an un-digital affair. Fifty-eight percent of black renters found housing through social networks. The same was true for only 41 percent of white renters. The vast majority of tenants who located housing through network ties relied on kin and friends, with white renters almost twice as likely to rely on friends as family members. In sharp contrast to research on finding employment that suggests that black job seekers receive less help from social ties than other groups, evidence from the Milwaukee Area Renters Study finds black house seekers received more. Cf. Sandra Susan Smith, Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism Among the Black Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007).
9. According to the owner, Tim Ballering, Affordable Rentals owned 322 units and managed an additional 484 as of July 2014.
10. “Our government doesn’t need to exist to take care of the poor and hungry. That’s the Church’s job,” said Pastor Daryl, adored by Larraine. Conservative politicians often express similar beliefs. In 2013, Republican congressman Doug LaMalfa voiced a sentiment shared by many in his party when he argued that low-income Americans should be helped “through the church…because it comes from the heart, not from a badge or a mandate.” But after watching people like Larraine and Crystal seek help from their churches, you can’t help but wonder if our hearts are really big enough for people with such heavy and persistent needs, people who need a lot more than some groceries now and again, a few hundred dollars here and there. (“My knowledge of social work is next to zero,” Pastor Daryl said.) In the biblical telling, the early Church was able to uplift the poor only after believers “sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need” (Acts 2:44). Modern-day churchgoers have been less inclined to make such sacrifices. Pastor Daryl was frustrated by what he called Larraine’s “poverty mentality,” her inability to “buckle down” and “manage her finances.” Minister Barber often called Crystal and snapped at her for doing things eighteen-year-olds are prone to do, like staying out late. Both people of the cloth had extended help in the past, and both had reasons why they felt they should not extend help in the future. Government mandates and entitlements are far from perfect, but they are less dependent on the limits of human compassion. LaMalfa was quoted in Michael Hilzik, “Families on Food Stamps Would Suffer While Farms Get Fat,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2013. On the role today’s black church plays in the inner city, see Omar McRoberts, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). On religious experience, see Timothy Nelson, Every Time I Feel the Spirit: Religious Experience and Ritual in an African American Church (New York: NYU Press, 2004).
11. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Camille Zubrinsky Charles, “The Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 167–207.
12. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 417. See also Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1938).
13. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 199.
14. Mumford, City in History, 462–63; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]).
15. Landlords exercised this privilege to such an effective degree that judges were pressured to exempt some items from seizure, especially tools used to earn a living. Frank Enever, History of the Law of Distress for Rent and Damage Feasant (London: Routledge and Sons, 1931); David Caplovitz, The Poor Pay More (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 162–63.
16. Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2001), chapter 1.
17. In 1928, 99 percent of Milwaukee’s blacks rented. Joe William Trotter Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 70.
18. Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chapter 1; Marcus Anthony Hunter, Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), chapter 3; Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), chapter 8; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 51–55; Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 21.
19. Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 6; see also Spear, Black Chicago, 148; Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 180.
20. Michael Bennett, When Dreams Come True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America (McLean: Brassey’s Publishing, 1966); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005).
21. At 43 percent, blacks have the lowest homeownership rates in the country today. At 73 percent, whites have the highest. Robert Callis and Melissa Kresin, Residential Vacancies and Homeownership in the Third Quarter 2014 (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, October 2014), Table 7; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014.
22. Satter, Family Properties, 430n7.
23. Drawing on the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011, Tracey Shollenberger and I designed a lagged OLS model estimating renters’ current neighborhood poverty and crime rates,
conditioning on their previous neighborhood poverty and crime rates. Examining the most recent move of all renters who moved sometime in the previous two years, we accounted for several important demographic factors—race, education, family structure, housing assistance—and several key life shocks potentially related to neighborhood selection: job loss, the birth of a child. Even after conditioning on a run of important factors and on previous neighborhood characteristics, experiencing a forced move is associated with more than one-third of a standard deviation increase in both neighborhood poverty and crime rate, relative to voluntary moves.
21. BIGHEADED BOY
1. Sherrena had charged Patrice “double damages.” Milwaukee landlords could bill tenants twice the rent for each day they remained on the property past the eviction notice expiration (704.27, Wis. Stats.). This was designed to help landlords recoup lost rental income when evicted tenants held up the property and prevented landlords from re-renting it. Sherrena usually didn’t do this, but she made an exception for Patrice. “Because she pissed us way off! Her mouth is too slick,” Sherrena said.
2. Cf. Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 63.
Poor housing conditions have been linked to asthma, lead poisoning, respiratory complications, developmental delays, heart disease, and neurological disorders, leading a prominent medical journal to call inadequate housing “a public health crisis.” Even limited exposure to substandard conditions could have lasting health effects, especially on children. On the link between housing and health, see Samiya Bashir, “Home Is Where the Harm Is: Inadequate Housing as a Public Health Crisis,” American Journal of Public Health 92 (2002): 733–38; Gary Evans, Nancy Wells, and Annie Moch, “Housing and Mental Health: A Review of the Evidence and a Methodological and Conceptual Critique,” Journal of Social Issues 59 (2003): 475–500; James Krieger and Donna Higgins, “Housing and Health: Time Again for Public Health Action,” American Journal of Public Health 92 (2002): 758–68; Wayne Morgan et al., “Results of a Home-Based Environmental Intervention Among Urban Children with Asthma,” New England Journal of Medicine 351 (2004): 1068–80; Joshua Sharfstein et al., “Is Child Health at Risk While Families Wait for Housing Vouchers?,” American Journal of Public Health 91 (2001): 1191–92.
3. Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), 476.
4. Robert Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
5. Julie Clark and Ade Kearns, “Housing Improvements, Perceived Housing Quality and Psychosocial Benefits from the Home,” Housing Studies 27 (2012): 915–39; James Dunn and Michael Hayes, “Social Inequality, Population Health, and Housing: A Study of Two Vancouver Neighborhoods,” Social Science and Medicine 51 (2000): 563–87. On “territorial stigmatization,” see Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), chapter 6.
22. IF THEY GIVE MOMMA THE PUNISHMENT
1. While living with Patricia, Crystal would tell anyone who asked that she was staying with “her mom.” Presumably, she would give survey researchers the same answer. Our current analytical toolkit, even with all the white-coated words of network analysis, is ill equipped to capture the complexity of relationships in which people like Crystal are enveloped. See Nan Lin, Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mario Small, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2012): 1295–335.
2. I did not personally witness this incident. I reconstructed the scene after multiple interviews with Crystal.
When tenuous but intense relationships between virtual strangers end badly—or violently, as they sometimes do—they foster deep misgivings between peers and neighbors, eroding community and network stability. The memory of having been used or mistreated by a disposable tie encourages people to be suspicious of others. Relying on disposable ties, then, is both a response to and a source of social instability.
Crystal’s cousins and foster sisters were around her age. They could not offer her shelter or much money, but they could fly to her side during a fight.
3. On the presence of Child Protective Services in the lives of poor black families, see Christopher Wildeman and Natalia Emanuel, “Cumulative Risks of Foster Care Placement by Age 18 for U.S. Children, 2000–2011,” PLOS ONE 9 (2014): 1–7; Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
4. In 2010, the New York Times reported that one in every fifty Americans lives in a household with an income consisting only of food stamps. Jason DeParle, “Living on Nothing but Food Stamps,” New York Times, January 2, 2010.
23. THE SERENITY CLUB
1. From Scott’s disciplinary proceedings in front of the Wisconsin Board of Nursing.
2. Consequential and costly policy decisions have been made based on the collective assumption that poor people lack connections to kin and friends who are gainfully employed, college educated, and homeowners. Mixed-income housing is intended to “provide low-income residents with exposure to employment opportunities and social role models.” Neighborhood relocation programs, such as Moving to Opportunity, are designed to connect low-income families to more “prosocial and affluent social networks.” But many poor people have plenty of ties to the upwardly mobile. Roughly 1 in 6 Milwaukee renters lives in a neighborhood with above average disadvantage but is embedded in networks with below average disadvantage. But simply having ties to the middle class is insufficient. Likely because of the popularity of the term “social capital,” researchers tend to think of prosocial connections to important or resource-rich people as something you “have” and that, like money, can be used whenever you’d like. In reality, as Scott’s experience shows, those connections matter only insofar as you are able to activate them. On social programs designed to combat “social isolation,” see US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program: Final Impacts Evaluation (Washington, DC: Office of Policy Development and Research, 2011); US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Mixed-Income Housing and the HOME Program (Washington, DC: Office of Policy Development and Research, 2003). For canonical theories about poverty and community life holding that spatial isolation (residential ghettoization) brings about social isolation (network ghettoization), see William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]); Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). For a detailed analysis of neighborhood and network disadvantage, see Matthew Desmond and Weihua An, “Neighborhood and Network Disadvantage Among Urban Renters,” Sociological Science 2 (2015): 329–50.
3. When he was using, Scott would sometimes call it “self-medicating.” It wasn’t just nurse talk. So many words and phrases exist to help cover over the rotten thing festering at the base of the root. How often, I wonder, is coping mistaken for culture?
4. The psychiatrist asked Scott, “Do you want to go straight to two hundred in Zoloft, or do you want to work up to it?”
“Straight to two hundred,” Scott answered. He didn’t think it made sense to drop his dosage, high as it was, since he had been on 200 mgs before.
5. When methadone made the news, it usually wasn’t pretty. The year Scott began his treatment program, methadone accounted for less than 2 percent of opioid pain-reliever prescriptions but almost one-third of the overdose deaths caused by opioid pain relievers. The medical community attribu
ted the troubling rise of methadone-related deaths to the increasing use of the drug to treat pain, not addiction. When it comes to treating heroin addiction and its broader social ramifications, methadone has been highly effective since being introduced in 1964. Known as a full opioid agonist, it feeds an addict’s cravings and allows him to function without impairment, if the dose is right. The evidence is consistent. Methadone reduces or eliminates heroin use, lowers overdoses as well as criminality associated with drug use, boosts patients’ health, and helps many live full, productive lives. When it comes to heroin addiction, the drug simply outperforms abstinence-only programs like AA. “You hear all these harsh stories about methadone,” one expert said, “but you never hear about the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are taking methadone every day, who work, who have largely conquered their habits and lead normal lives.” Scott was becoming one of those people. Peter Friedmann, quoted in Harold Pollack, “This Drug Could Make a Huge Dent in Heroin Addiction. So Why Isn’t It Used More?,” Washington Post, November 23, 2013. See also Herman Joseph, Sharon Stancliff, and John Langrod, “Methadone Maintenance Treatment (MMT): A Review of Historical and Clinical Issues,” Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine 67 (1999): 347–64; Centers for Disease Control, “Vital Signs: Risk for Overdose from Methadone Used for Pain Relief—United States, 1999–2010,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 61 (2012): 493–97.
6. Sally Satel, “Happy Birthday, Methadone!,” Washington Monthly, November/December 2014.
24. CAN’T WIN FOR LOSING
1. This means that to divide the urban poor into two groups, the unstable and the stable, the undeserving and deserving, the decent and street, is often to misrecognize as immutable that which is regularly transitory and tenuous. Stability and instability: these are not fixed states as much as temporary conditions poor families experience for varying periods of time. Problems bleed into each other. The murder of a loved one can lead to depression, which can lead to job loss, which can lead to eviction, which can lead to homelessness, which can intensify one’s depression, and so on. Policymakers and their researchers can be prone to aiming a silver bullet at one of these problems. But a shotgun’s wide blast might be preferred. On cascades of adversity among low-income families, see Timothy Black, When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On and Off the Streets (New York: Vintage, 2009); Matthew Desmond, “Severe Deprivation in America,” Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences, forthcoming; Kristin Perkins and Robert Sampson, “Compounded Deprivation in the Transition to Adulthood: The Intersection of Racial and Economic Inequality Among Chicagoans, 1995–2013,” Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences, forthcoming; Bruce Western, “Lifetimes of Violence in a Sample of Released Prisoners,” Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences, forthcoming.