Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  2. Milwaukee neighborhoods with more children had more evictions, even after accounting for their poverty rate, racial composition, and a number of other things. In neighborhoods where children made up less than 10 percent of the population in 2010, 1 renting household in 123 was evicted. In those where children made up at least 40 percent of the population, 1 household in every 12 was. All else equal, a 1 percent increase in the percentage of children in a neighborhood is predicted to increase a neighborhood’s evictions by almost 7 percent. These estimates are based on court-ordered eviction records that took place in Milwaukee County between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2010. The statistical model evaluating the association between a neighborhood’s percentage of children and its number of evictions is a zero-inflated Poisson regression, which is described in detail in Matthew Desmond et al., “Evicting Children,” Social Forces 92 (2013): 303–27.

  3. That misery could stick around. At least two years after their eviction, mothers like Arleen still experienced significantly higher rates of depression than their peers. See Matthew Desmond and Rachel Tolbert Kimbro, “Eviction’s Fallout: Housing, Hardship, and Health,” Social Forces (2015), in press. See also Marc Fried, “Grieving for a Lost Home,” in The Urban Condition: People and Policy in the Metropolis, ed. Leonard Duhl (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 151–71; Theresa Osypuk et al., “The Consequences of Foreclosure for Depressive Symptomatology,” Annals of Epidemiology 22 (2012): 379–87.

  4. Another approach involves surveying a person’s resources before trying to access them. Because in poor neighborhoods the most accepted way to say no is to say, “I can’t,” people sometimes try to take that option off the table. So, for example, instead of asking, “Can I get a ride?” you ask, “You got gas in your car?” Instead of asking, “Could you make me a plate?” you ask, “You eat?” When someone knows you have gas in your tank or food in your refrigerator, it’s harder to give a good reason for turning him or her away. Through everyday interaction, the poor have picked up what political fund-raisers and development officers have spent millions of dollars to discover: that there is a delicate art to “the ask.” Knowing how to ask for help—and, in turn, when to extend or withhold aid—is an essential skill for managing poverty.

  Asking social workers for help comes with its own set of rules. You don’t want to ask for nothing, because you’ll receive nothing in return. But you also don’t want to come off as too needy, too hungry, too on the edge—because Child Protective Services might soon pay you a visit. I once met a woman, a thirty-three-year-old mother of two teenage girls, who drank a lot. She attributed her drinking to traumatic events that happened to her as a child. “I remember. Down to the smell.”

  “Have you ever seen a counselor?” I asked.

  “No. I thought about it. But they get too deep into your business. I had somebody make a false allegation against me with child services in California. They didn’t find nothing, but it was traumatizing just the same, having somebody come through my door…and talk to my kids by theyself.”

  If she told someone how damaged she was, and how she coped, would she be allowed to keep her children? This mother didn’t know and wasn’t going to find out.

  5. I did not personally witness this interaction. Arleen told me about it.

  EPILOGUE: HOME AND HOPE

  1. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 13; with special thanks to Rowan Flad and Shamus Khan for etymology insights.

  2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), 511.

  3. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, vol. 2, The Negro Social Structure (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishers, 1964 [1944]), 810.

  4. Plato, The Republic (New York: Penguin Classics, 1987), 312. I have changed “men” to “people.”

  5. Mary Schwartz and Ellen Wilson, Who Can Afford to Live in a Home? A Look at Data from the 2006 American Community Survey (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2007).

  6. Chester Hartman and David Robinson, “Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem,” Housing Policy Debate 14 (2003): 461–501.

  7. Gary Evans, “The Environment of Childhood Poverty,” American Psychologist 59 (2004): 77–92; Shigehiro Oishi, “The Psychology of Residential Mobility: Implications for the Self, Social Relationships, and Well-Being,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 5 (2010): 5–21; Robert Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

  8. In fact, one can detect a thick middle-class bias among researchers who assume that moves are deliberate and planned. For a further explanation of the intentionality bias in residential mobility research, see Matthew Desmond and Tracey Shollenberger, “Forced Displacement from Rental Housing: Prevalence and Neighborhood Consequences,” Demography, forthcoming. On high rates of residential mobility among poor families, see David Ihrke and Carol Faber, Geographical Mobility: 2005 to 2010 (Washington, DC: United States Census Bureau, 2012); Robin Phinney, “Exploring Residential Mobility Among Low-Income Families,” Social Service Review 87 (2013): 780–815.

  9. This finding comes from a negative binomial model that estimated the number of moves renters undertook in the previous two years, conditioning on household income, race, education, gender, family status, age, criminal record, and three recent life shocks: job loss, relationship dissolution, and eviction. The analysis found that low incomes predicted higher rates of mobility only before controlling for involuntary displacement and that, all else equal, renters who experienced a forced move were expected to have a moving rate 1.3 times greater than those who avoided involuntary displacement. See Matthew Desmond, Carl Gershenson, and Barbara Kiviat, “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters,” Social Service Review 89 (2015): 227–62. By “Milwaukee’s poorest renters,” I mean renting households in the lowest income quartile (with incomes below $12,204). Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.

  10. On Jackson County, Missouri, see Tara Raghuveer, “ ‘We Be Trying’: A Multistate Analysis of Eviction and the Affordable Housing Crisis,” B.A. thesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Committee on the Degrees in Social Studies, 2014). In 2012, New York City’s Housing Courts processed 28,743 eviction judgments and 217,914 eviction filings for nonpayment. See New York City Rent Guidelines Board, 2013 Income and Affordability Study, April 4, 2013. Cleveland, a city of approximately 95,702 occupied renter households, saw 11,072 eviction filings in 2012 and 11,031 in 2013—meaning that almost 12 percent of renter households were summoned to eviction court each year. See Northeast Ohio Apartment Association, Suites magazine, “Eviction Index,” 2012–2013; American Community Survey, 2013. In 2012, an estimated 32,231 evictions were filed in Chicago, which represents 7 percent of the city’s rental inventory; see Kay Cleaves, “Cook Eviction Stats Part 5: Are Eviction Filings Increasing?,” StrawStickStone.com, February 8, 2013.

  11. Matthew Desmond and Carl Gershenson, “Housing and Employment Insecurity Among the Working Poor,” Social Problems, forthcoming.

  12. Evictions also help to exacerbate the problem most responsible for their rise by driving up rents. This is plain in cases where landlords evict tenants from rent-regulated units so that they may offer apartments at market rates. But it is also true of normal evictions of families from unregulated units because it is easier to raise the rent on new tenants than old ones. In Milwaukee, a tenant annually pays almost $58 less in rent for every year she has lived in an apartment, all else equal. Turnover facilitates rent hikes, and evictions create turnover. Matthew Desmond and Kristin Perkins, “Are Landlords Overcharging Voucher Holders?,” working paper, Harvard University, June 2015. In San Francisco, Ellis Act evictions—often used to convert rent-regulated apartments into condos or market-rate units—increased by 170 percent between March 2010 and February 2013. Marisa Lagos, “San Francisco Evictions Surge, Report Finds,” San Francisco Gate, November 5, 2013.
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  13. Matthew Desmond and Rachel Tolbert Kimbro, “Eviction’s Fallout: Housing, Hardship, and Health,” Social Forces (2015), in press.

  14. Desmond et al., “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters.”

  15. Technically, the results of lagged dependent variable regression models showed that experiencing a forced move is associated with a standard deviation increase of more than one-third in both neighborhood poverty and crime rates, relative to voluntary moves. Across all models, the most robust and consistent predictors of neighborhood downgrades between moves are race (whether a renter is African American) and move type (whether the move was forced). Desmond and Shollenberger, “Forced Displacement from Rental Housing.”

  16. Sampson, Great American City; Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

  17. This finding is documented in a study called “Eviction’s Fallout,” coauthored with Rachel Kimbro. In that study, we rely on a dichotomous indicator to measure depressive symptoms in mothers. Mothers were asked a series of questions, focused on experiences in the previous twelve months, based on the Composite International Diagnostic Interview Short Form (CIDI-SF). Respondents were asked whether they had feelings of dysphoria (depression) or anhedonia (inability to enjoy what is usually pleasurable) in the past year that lasted for two weeks or more, and if so, whether the symptoms lasted most of the day and occurred every day of the two-week period. If so, they were asked more specific questions about: (a) losing interest, (b) feeling tired, (c) change in weight, (d) trouble sleeping, (e) trouble concentrating, (f) feeling worthless, and (g) thinking about death. Mothers were classified as probable cases of depression if they endorsed either dysphoria or anhedonia plus two of the other symptoms in the follow-up questions (leading to a CIDI-SF MD score of 3 or higher). Results are robust to varying the cut-point for the depression scale as well as to negative binomial models estimating the number of depressive symptoms respondents reported. See Ronald Kessler et al., “Methodological Studies of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) in the US National Comorbidity Survey (NCS),” International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research 7 (1998): 33–55.

  18. Michael Serby et al., “Eviction as a Risk Factor for Suicide,” Psychiatric Services 57 (2006): 273–74. Katherine Fowler et al., “Increase in Suicides Associated with Home Eviction and Foreclosure During the US Housing Crisis: Findings from 16 National Violent Death Reporting System States, 2005–2010,” American Journal of Public Health 105 (2015): 311–16.

  19. Sampson, Great American City.

  20. This result draws on neighborhood-level data for Milwaukee, 2005–2007. Using a lagged-response model, I predicted a neighborhood’s violent-crime rate for one year, controlling for violent crime and eviction rates the previous year as well as for the percentage of families in poverty, of African Americans in the neighborhood, of the population under eighteen years of age, of residents with less than a high school education, and of households receiving housing assistance. The final model documented a significant association between a neighborhood’s violent crime rate and its eviction rate the previous year (B = .155; p < .05). See Matthew Desmond, “Do More Evictions Lead to Higher Crime? Neighborhood Consequences of Forced Displacement,” working paper, Harvard University, August 2015.

  21. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.

  22. United States Conference of Mayors, Hunger and Homelessness Survey (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Mayors, 2013); Martha Burt, “Homeless Families, Singles, and Others: Findings from the 1996 National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients,” Housing Policy Debate 12 (2001): 737–80; Maureen Crane and Anthony Warnes, “Evictions and Prolonged Homelessness,” Housing Studies 15 (2000): 757–73.

  On the effects of substandard housing and unsafe neighborhoods on children’s health, see Julie Clark and Ade Kearns, “Housing Improvements, Perceived Housing Quality and Psychosocial Benefits from the Home,” Housing Studies 27 (2012): 915–39; Tama Leventhal and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, “The Neighborhoods They Live In: The Effects of Neighborhood Residence on Child and Adolescent Outcomes,” Psychological Bulletin 126 (2000): 309–37.

  23. Joseph Harkness and Sandra Newman, “Housing Affordability and Children’s Well-Being: Evidence from the National Survey of America’s Families,” Housing Policy Debate 16 (2005): 223–55; Sandra Newman and Scott Holupka, “Housing Affordability and Investments in Children,” Journal of Housing Economics 24 (2014): 89–100.

  24. In other markets, when a commodity gets too expensive, people can buy less of it. When the price of oil shoots up, people can drive less. When a sad corn crop scales up the price of beef, people can eat fewer burgers. But when the price of rent and utilities rises, most poor Americans do not have the option of consuming cheaper or smaller housing, because it doesn’t exist in their city. According to the 2013 American Housing Survey (Table C-02-RO), roughly 98 percent of renting households below the poverty line live in apartments with at least one bedroom, and 68 percent live in units with two or more bedrooms. In Milwaukee, fully 97 percent of renters live in a one-, two-, or three-bedroom unit. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. Smaller housing units have vanished from the American city. In the 1970s and 1980s more than a million single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel units were regulated out by new building standards or upwardly converted to cater to better-off renters. See Whet Moser, “The Long, Slow Decline of Chicago’s SROs,” Chicago magazine, June 14, 2013; Brendan O’Flaherty, Making Room: The Economics of Homelessness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 142–47; James Wright and Beth Rubin, “Is Homelessness a Housing Problem?,” Housing Policy Debate 2 (1991): 937–56; Christopher Jencks, The Homeless (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), chapter 6.

  Besides moving away from their job, friends, family, and community, the only way low-income tenants can shrink their housing is by taking in boarders. But many landlords simply do not allow this. Even if they were to overlook maximum-occupancy regulations, more people in an apartment means more maintenance costs and a higher water bill. The majority of Milwaukee renter households (75 percent) are not responsible for the water bill. For insight into how landlords and property managers think about occupancy and cost in relation to that bill, consider what Joe Parazinski, a white building manager who lived and worked in the inner city, had to say: “If I move in [more] people, all of a sudden now there’s ten living there. Well, now that’s ten showers a day….Now the toilet, instead of being flushed twenty times a day, it’s now being flushed two hundred times. Now, how many more loads are going to be run through the washer machine?…When you start adding that shit up, it’s not petty.”

  Housing advocates tend to think “doubling up” is a problem, but poor renters tend to think doubling up is a solution—because although overcrowding is not innocent of consequences, the much bigger problem they face is undercrowding, the coerced overconsumption of housing they cannot afford. The majority of poor renting households nationwide are not overcrowded: 24 percent of those households have more than 1.5 persons per bedroom. Only 8 percent of all renter households in Milwaukee have more than two people per bedroom. By this definition of overcrowding—more than two people per bedroom—4 percent of white renters, 8 percent of black renters, and 16 percent of Hispanic renters in Milwaukee live in overcrowded apartments. Almost half of all adult renters in Milwaukee do not live with another adult. African American renters in Milwaukee are particularly isolated when it comes to their living arrangements: only 35 percent live with another adult, compared to 58 percent of white renters and 69 percent of Hispanic renters. Among all Milwaukee renters, 32 percent live alone, 16 percent live only with children, and 53 percent live with another adult. Thirty-nine percent of black renters live alone, compared to 33 percent of white renters and 14 percent of Hispanic renters. Twenty-six percent of black renters live only with children, compare
d to 9 percent of white renters and 17 percent of Hispanic renters. Some surveyed renters likely failed to disclose other adults living with them, especially if the landlord was unaware of them. In the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study (2011), interviewers asked tenants to list all adults who lived or stayed with them. After explaining how their information would be kept confidential, interviewers told participants: “I’m interested in all adults that live or stay with you—even if they are not on the lease and even if your landlord doesn’t know about them.” Tenants in eviction court listed 375 co-resident adults, including 70 who were not leaseholders. Black men made up the largest group of adults not listed on the Summons and Complaint (N=32), followed by black women (N=24). My estimate of the percentage of black renters who live alone (or without another adult) is probably somewhat inflated, then; but the point about the prevalence of overcrowding among renters not matching the concern about overcrowding among policymakers and analysts remains. American Housing Survey (2013), Table C-02-RO; Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.