Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  9. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. Between 2009 and 2011, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $550; for a three-bedroom it was $775.

  The professionalization of the rental market, combined with the spread of information technology, may have contributed to compressing rents within cities through either competition or price coordination. Large-scale property managers often rely on products with names like Rainmaker LRO, RentPush, and RENTmaximizer—complex algorithms that draw on hundreds of current and historical market indicators to adjust lease prices daily, even hourly. The RENTmaximizer, used in over 8 million residential units worldwide, offers property owners “higher revenue by quicker adjustments to market conditions” (www.yardi.com). For do-it-yourself types, how-to real estate books advised landlords to conduct monthly market surveys. “You call nearby complexes and check out what their rental rates are to make sure you are not too high and not too low,” writes Bryan Chavis in Buy It, Rent It, Profit! Make Money as a Landlord in Any Real Estate Market (New York: Touchstone, 2009), 51. Picking up the phone was an extra measure, since several websites stood ready to report whether an apartment was above or below rent in the surrounding area (www.rentometer.com).

  10. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011; merged with neighborhood-level data from the American Community Survey (2006–2010) and Milwaukee Police Department crime records (2009–2011). Consider one other statistic: the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $575 in Milwaukee’s most dangerous neighborhoods (those at or above the 75th percentile in violent crime rate) and $600 in its least dangerous (those at or below the 25th percentile in violent crime rate).

  11. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 11; Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 24–26; Joe William Trotter Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 179; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 54; Marcus Anthony Hunter, Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 80.

  12. According to the Community Advocates rent abatement guidelines at the time of this fieldwork, a tenant could withhold 5 percent for no door or if the apartment was infested with roaches; 10 percent for a broken toilet; and 25 percent for no heat.

  13. Landlords with vacant units could lower their rent, but some would prefer the vacancy. Sherrena once showed a prospective tenant, a truck driver, a ground-floor unit in a four-family complex. It had sat empty for two months. The man looked at the patches of carpet a dog had mangled, fingered the unhinged cupboards, squeaked his shoe on the grimy kitchen floor. “This just isn’t the kind of living I’m used to,” he said. “How about $380?”

  “No way,” Sherrena responded, offended.

  Collecting $380 would have been better than collecting nothing for that particular unit—but not if it meant that rent for everyone else in the building would drop. The three other units in the complex were occupied with tenants paying $600 a month. If Sherrena took the truck driver’s deal, the other tenants would learn about it and likely demand a similar rate. If she allowed it, her take-home would be less than it was renting three units at $600. If she refused, some tenants might leave, causing more vacancies. Sherrena showed the truck driver out and locked the door behind him.

  14. Forty-four percent, to be exact. Serious and lasting housing problems are defined above (chapter 6, note 1). Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.

  15. Comparing two-bedroom units in the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. In the 1970s and 1980s, rents increased primarily because housing quality did; see Christopher Jencks, The Homeless (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 84–89. But since then, housing quality across America had remained virtually unchanged—if anything, the 2000s saw small declines in quality nationwide—while rents shot up. According to the American Housing Survey, there were approximately 909,000 renter-occupied units with severe physical problems in 1993. That number increased to 1.2 million by 2011. The proportion of all rental households with severe physical problems has remained flat over the last two decades (at roughly 3 percent). The same is true for other measures of housing quality. For example, in 1993, 9 percent of renters reported being “uncomfortably cold for 24 hours or more” because the heating broke. In 2011, 10 percent did. During the 2000s, rental housing across America did not undergo drastic improvements that kept pace with rent increases.

  16. When those properties stopped cashing out, because they amassed too many fines or required costly repairs, Sherrena would “let ’em go back to the city.” This meant she would simply stop paying taxes on those properties until the city eventually took control of them through tax foreclosures. Sherrena shielded herself from any personal liability by registering each of her properties under a different Limited Liability Company (LLC). In the eyes of the law, it was the company, not Sherrena, that defaulted. Milwaukee saw between 1,100 and 1,200 properties go into tax foreclosure every year. When the city inherited these used-up and discarded houses, it sold or demolished them, further shrinking the affordable housing stock. For Sherrena, losing property this way was not a mistake or the result of a financial setback. It was a basic part of her business model. “When I get tired of a property,” she said, “I just let it go. Why would you keep throwing good money at the bad?”

  Sherrena created LLCs online, through the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions (DFI). The DFI records a registered agent for each LLC but not owner names or Wisconsin tax information (www.wdfi.org). The estimates for the number of tax foreclosures in Milwaukee come from Kevin Sullivan, Assistant City Attorney (personal communication, August 13, 2015).

  Policymakers and researchers focused on poor people’s housing, most of whom have never set foot in an apartment like Doreen’s, often point out that America has made impressive strides toward improving housing quality for its poor. “The affordability of housing is today of far greater concern than physical condition or crowding,” Alex Schwartz writes, echoing the prevailing view (Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 2nd ed. [New York: Routledge, 2010], 26). This view is not wrong, but it gives the impression that the two problems are independent of each other; that since cities have razed tenements and criminalized lead paint, it is now time to confront the lack of affordable housing. But the two problems—poor housing conditions and high costs—are interlocked. At the bottom of the housing market, each permits the other.

  17. Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 72; Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 46–47; Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson, Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), chapter 2.

  18. The sociologist Linda Burton refers to the process of young people being prematurely exposed to the world of adults as “childhood adultification.” See Linda Burton, “Childhood Adultification in Economically Disadvantaged Families: A Conceptual Model,” Family Relations 56 (2007): 329–45.

  19. I didn’t witness this, but I did see the broken table and discussed the matter with Doreen, Patrice, Natasha, and Patrice’s children. This is how Patrice’s ten-year-old son, Mikey, interpreted that event: “You know, some people just be stressed. Everybody gets stressed, gets mad sometimes. And they was stressed and just had to let it out.” He said it made him feel “embarrassed because of how it makes our family look, as a unit.”

  7. THE SICK

  1. Since the early 1990s, opioid prescriptions have tripled in the United States, as have overdoses. Centers for Disease Control, Policy Impact: Prescription Pain Killer Overdoses (Washington, DC: Centers for Disease Control, 2011); National Institutes of Health, Analy
sis of Opioid Prescription Practices Finds Areas of Concern (Washington, DC: NIH News, US Department of Health and Human Services, 2011).

  2. Stacey Mayes and Marcus Ferrone, “Transdermal System for the Management of Acute Postoperative Pain,” Annals of Pharmacotherapy 40 (2006): 2178–86.

  3. This quotation and other events of Scott’s drug use during his time as a nurse come from the record of Scott’s disciplinary proceedings in front of the Wisconsin Board of Nursing. I corroborated the details with Scott.

  4. See Wisconsin Statutes 19.31–19.39 and 59.20(3).

  5. City of Milwaukee, Landlord Training Program: Keeping Illegal and Destructive Activity Out of Rental Property, 7th ed. (Milwaukee: City of Milwaukee, Department of Neighborhood Services, 2006).

  6. RentGrow has since become Yardi Resident Screening, which offers “terrorist, drug trafficker, sex offender, and Social Security fraud screening” (www.yardi.com). In the United States there are approximately 650 tenant-screening companies. Although these reports are often riddled with errors, landlords increasingly have come to rely on them. See Rudy Kleysteuber, “Tenant Screening Thirty Years Later: A Statutory Proposal to Protect Public Records,” Yale Law Journal 116 (2006): 1344–88; Matthew Callanan, “Protecting the Unconvicted: Limiting Iowa’s Rights to Public Access in Search of Greater Protection for Criminal Defendants Whose Charges Do Not End in Convictions,” Iowa Law Review 98 (2013): 1275–308.

  7. “These tenants, a lot of them it’s like pigs in a dollhouse,” Wilbur Bush told me. An older African American man with a flattop, leather jacket, and gold crucifix, Bush had been a landlord since the 1960s. Bush personally inspected applicants’ current apartments, making sure to open the refrigerator. (I accompanied him on apartment screening visits and sat in his office as he interviewed tenants.) “So what you’re doing here, if you can relate,” he continued, “you’re trying to get the best of the worst….Because I’ve been in places where it’s an upward climb to zero.”

  8. Some screening techniques were not mentioned that Saturday morning. One landlord, whose father was also a landlord, told me he uses the following strategy: Upon receiving an application from a woman with children, he looks first not at her income or previous residence but at the emergency contacts. “If they list a mother and a father, I know I won’t have any trouble with the lease.” But if she lists just a mother, he then looks at the applicant’s last name. If it differs from her mother’s, he infers the applicant is divorced or remarried, a plus. If the surnames match, he considers the applicant a single mother by a single mother—and usually turns her down.

  9. This is a very different way of understanding how certain people get sorted into certain neighborhoods, compared to conventional perspectives—one that pays attention to the people doing the sorting: the landlords. For the Chicago School, the city was a space of sentiments and its pattern of physical and social segregation primarily the result of tens of thousands of individual decisions based on where one best fits. “In the long run,” wrote Robert Park, “every individual finds somewhere among the varied manifestations of city life the sort of environment in which he expands or feels at ease.” See Robert Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” in The City, eds. Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 41. The sentimental neighborhood, like the plant habitat on which the urban ecology perspective was based, becomes for all purposes sentient, drawing to it those who belong. R. D. McKenzie would explain residential sorting as being steered by “a selective or magnetic force [emanating from various neighborhoods] attracting to itself appropriate population elements and repelling incongruous units, thus making for biological and cultural subdivisions of a city’s population.” R. D. McKenzie, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community,” in Park, Burgess, and McKenzie, eds., The City, 63–79, 78.

  The most influential perspective on residential mobility—the residential attainment model—is deeply influenced by the Chicago School’s vision of mobility and neighborhood sorting. But those working within this tradition substitute the Chicago School’s emphasis on sentimentality and morality with one focused on instrumentality and economic advancement. The residential attainment model perceives mobility as a result of social climbing and views the city not as a patchwork of isolated moral worlds but as a geography of advantage and disadvantage. According to this perspective, when people move, they try to move up, parlaying economic capital for residential capital. See John Logan and Richard Alba, “Locational Returns to Human Capital: Minority Access to Suburban Community Resources,” Demography 30 (1993): 243–68; Scott South and Kyle Crowder, “Escaping Distressed Neighborhoods: Individual, Community, and Metropolitan Influences,” American Journal of Sociology 102 (1997): 1040–84.

  What each perspective overlooks is the crucial fact that urban neighborhoods are markets, largely owned, in the case of the inner city, by those who do not live within their borders. Consequentially, market actors in general—and landlords, in particular—should be seen as central players in our theories of neighborhood selection and mobility. See John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 33–34.

  10. On neighborhood variation, see Robert Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Peter St. Jean, Pockets of Crime: Broken Windows, Collective Efficacy, and the Criminal Point of View (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

  11. See John Caskey, Fringe Banking: Check-Cashing Outlets, Pawnshops, and the Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013); Gary Rivlin, Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. (New York: Harper, 2010).

  8. CHRISTMAS IN ROOM 400

  1. Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 88–133.

  2. In 2013, Milwaukee County processed almost 64,000 civil cases, roughly double the number of its criminal cases. Nationwide, the incoming civil caseload in 2010 was 13.8 million, compared to 10.6 million criminal cases. Wisconsin Circuit Court, Caseload Summary by Responsible Court Official, County Wide Report (Madison, WI: Wisconsin Courts, 2014). Court Statistics Project, National Civil and Criminal Caseloads and Civil/Criminal Court Caseloads: Total Caseloads (Williamsburg, VA: National Center for State Courts, 2010).

  3. One Milwaukee landlord who owned roughly 100 units in low-income neighborhoods told me he gave approximately 30 percent of his tenants five-day eviction notices each month. A $50 late fee accompanied each notice. He estimated that 90 percent of those cases were settled via stipulation; the remaining 10 percent were evicted. This meant that he collected roughly $1,350 in late fees each month from tenants he did not evict. That amounted to over $16,000 a year in late fees alone.

  4. Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011. In addition to surveying tenants, interviewers took eviction court attendance every weekday (save one) between January 17 and February 26, 2011. During this six-week period, in 945 out of 1,328 cases, tenants did not appear in court, with most receiving an eviction judgment. Of those that did appear in court, slightly more than one-third signed stipulation agreements. Some would later be evicted; some would not. One-quarter had to return to court on another day, owing to paperwork errors or because their case was complicated enough to be sent to a judge. Twelve percent had their cases dismissed. The remaining 29 percent received eviction judgments.

  Documented default rates in other cities and states range from 35 percent to over 90 percent. See Randy Gerchick, “No Easy Way Out: Making the Summary Eviction Process a Fairer and More Efficient Alternative to Landlord Self-Help,” UCLA Law Review 41 (1994): 759–837; Erik Larson, “Case Characteristics and Defendant Tenant Default in a Housing Court,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 3 (2006): 121–44; David Caplovitz, Consumers in Trouble: A Study of Debtors in Default (New York: The Free Press, 1974
).

  5. With Jonathan Mijs, I combined all eviction court records between January 17 and February 26, 2011 (the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study period) with information about aspects of tenants’ neighborhoods, procured after geocoding the addresses that appeared in the eviction records. Working with the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, I also calculated the distance (in drive miles and time) between tenants’ addresses and the courthouse. Then I constructed a statistical model that attempted to explain the likelihood of a tenant appearing in court based on aspects of that tenant’s case and her or his neighborhood. The model generated only null findings. How much a tenant owed a landlord, her commute time to the courthouse, her gender—none of these factors were significantly related to appearing in court. I also investigated whether several aspects of a tenant’s neighborhood—e.g., its eviction, poverty, and crime rates—mattered when it came to explaining defaults. None did. None of the explanatory variables I tried were statistically associated with showing up to eviction court. The absence of a clear pattern in the data implies that defaults are more or less random. Other studies have arrived at similar conclusions, as have the housing specialists at Community Advocates. One told me: “As for going down to the courthouse…well, they have to eat; they’ve got to ride the bus; got to find someone to watch their kids. Everything is pretty much driven by the moment.” See Barbara Bezdek, “Silence in the Court: Participation and Subordination of Poor Tenants’ Voices in Legal Process,” Hofstra Law Review 20 (1992): 533–608; Larson, “Case Characteristics and Defendant Tenant Default in a Housing Court.”

  6. Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011. For more information about the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, see Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty”; Matthew Desmond et al., “Evicting Children,” Social Forces 92 (2013): 303–27. According to the 2013 American Housing Survey (Table S-08-RO), 71 percent of poor renting families who reported receiving an eviction notice within the last three months did so because of missed rent payments.