Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  11. THE ’HOOD IS GOOD

  1. Researchers and legal scholars typically speculate that rents respond to market pressures (a city’s vacancy rate) or policy interventions (providing legal aid). But sometimes landlords raise rents when they intuit that tenants can pay more. If Ricky One Leg couldn’t pay, Belinda could. As Sherrena would say: “Ricky’s in for a rude awakening. His rent is going up. I don’t care. He can move….Because I’m sure Belinda’s going to have some more…tenants. I’m taking his rent up fifty bucks.”

  2. Technically, gross rent may exceed the FMR payment standard if voucher holders are willing to pay the difference and if the unit passes rent reasonableness inspection.

  3. Deborah Devine, Housing Choice Voucher Location Patterns: Implications for Participant and Neighborhood Welfare (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2003); George Galster, “Consequences from the Redistribution of Urban Poverty During the 1990s: A Cautionary Tale,” Economic Development Quarterly 19 (2005): 119–25.

  4. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011; US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Final FY 2008 Fair Market Rent Documentation System.

  5. Robert Collinson and Peter Ganong, “Incidence and Price Discrimination: Evidence from Housing Vouchers,” working paper, Harvard University and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2014; Eva Rosen, The Rise of the Horizontal Ghetto: Poverty in a Post–Public Housing Era, PhD diss. (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2014).

  6. The Milwaukee Area Renters Study offered a unique opportunity to investigate if voucher holders were being overcharged because the sample included assisted and unassisted renters. Working with Kristin Perkins, I merged addresses represented in the Milwaukee Area Renters Study data set with property records. Doing so provided detailed information on housing quality, including square footage, building age, assessed value per square foot, building type (duplex, single-family), amenities (fireplace, air-conditioning, garage), and housing problems. We also gathered several measures of neighborhood quality, including an area’s poverty rate, racial composition, and median home value. Next, we controlled for neighborhood amenities like the distance to the nearest park, bus stop, and grocery store, as well as the average test scores for the school to which the address was zoned. A run of demographic variables about the renters was also included. Hedonic regression models estimated a significant relationship between holding a voucher and rent, with the voucher premium being an additional $49 to $70 a month, depending on model specification. Voucher holders also experienced more housing problems, which casts doubt on the idea that their higher rents reflect newer appliances or other perks not captured in the data. (For full models, see Matthew Desmond and Kristin Perkins, “Are Landlords Overcharging Voucher Holders?,” working paper, Harvard University, June 2015.) In 2010, 5,455 households in Milwaukee subsidized their housing costs with a rent-reducing voucher. Taking the results of our primary model, which includes 27 control variables and finds a $55 monthly rent premium for voucher holders, we estimate that the Housing Choice Voucher Program costs an additional $3.6 million each year in Milwaukee alone ($55 × 12 months × 5,455 vouchers). According to the City of Milwaukee, the average per-unit cost for a voucher-assisted household was $511 per month in 2010, or $6,126 a year. Dividing $3.6 million by $6,126 comes to roughly 588 additional families who could have been provided assistance if voucher holders were not overcharged. Some real estate manuals now include sections documenting profits that can be made from renting to voucher holders. See, e.g., Carleton H. Sheets, Real Estate: The World’s Greatest Wealth Builder (Chicago: Bonus Books, 1998), 121.

  7. Charles Orlebeke, “The Evolution of Low-Income Housing Policy, 1949 to 1999,” Housing Policy Debate 11 (2000): 489–520, 502.

  8. When Congress was debating the Taft-Ellender-Wagner bill, which would eventually become the Housing Act of 1949, the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards called public housing “the cutting edge of the Communist front.” The association waged a fierce battle—it funded radio appeals, penned editorials, and rallied its members to call their congressman—and might have won if the construction industry and its union, eager to pour concrete, hadn’t flexed their muscle. The act passed by five votes. If it had not, federal provisions for public housing would have disappeared. See Louis Winnick, “The Triumph of Housing Allowance Programs: How a Fundamental Policy Conflict Was Resolved,” Cityscape 1 (1995): 95–118, 101; Lawrence Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 238–41.

  When real estate developers in the mid-twentieth century backed public housing efforts to release coveted urban land for private enterprise, they were more the exception than the rule. Plus, those developers did not support public housing per se; they viewed it as a necessary vehicle through which to execute slum clearance and land grabs. Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 104–34.

  9. See Philip Tegeler, Michael Hanley, and Judith Liben, “Transforming Section 8: Using Federal Housing Subsidies to Promote Individual Housing Choice and Desegregation,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 30 (1995): 451–86; Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, Pub. L. No. 93–383, § 101(a)(1), (c)(6), 88 Stat. 633, 633–34.

  10. On foreclosures of rental property, see Gabe Treves, California Renters in the Foreclosure Crisis, Third Annual Report (San Francisco: Tenants Together, 2011); Vicki Been and Allegra Glashausser, “Tenants: Innocent Victims of the Foreclosure Crisis,” Albany Government Law Review 2 (2009); Matthew Desmond, “Housing Crisis in the Inner City,” Chicago Tribune, April 18, 2010; and Craig Karmin, Robbie Whelan, and Jeannette Neumann, “Rental Market’s Big Buyers,” Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2012. Real estate investment manuals promoted investing in foreclosed and damaged properties long before the crash. “Distressed properties can literally make you rich,” one advised in 1998. “Banks don’t like foreclosures. But real estate investors do, because foreclosures can be quick bargain buys.” Sheets, Real Estate, 231, 234.

  11. Dwight Jaffee, Anthony Lynch, Matthew Richardson, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, “Mortgage Organization and Securitization in the Financial Crisis,” in Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System, eds. Viral Acharya and Matthew Richardson (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 61–82.

  12. Kenneth Harney, “Even with Great Credit and Big Down Payment, Home Loans Will Cost More in 2011,” Washington Post, January 8, 2011.

  13. By one estimate, foreclosure discounts are on average 27 percent of the value of the property. John Campbell, Stefano Giglio, and Parag Pathak, “Forced Sales and House Prices,” American Economic Review 101 (2011): 2108–121.

  14. I wasn’t there when the door fell on Ruby and then Doreen. Later, I did see the door off its hinges and Doreen’s swollen foot and confirmed this story with several Hinkstons.

  12. DISPOSABLE TIES

  1. This was done so that the apartment would not sit vacant for any amount of time.

  2. I did not personally witness this event but reconstructed the scene after speaking with Arleen, Crystal, and Sherrena.

  3. A recent study estimated that between one-third and a half of youths aging out of foster care experience homelessness by the time they turn twenty-six. Amy Dworsky, Laura Napolitano, and Mark Courtney, “Homelessness During the Transition from Foster Care to Adulthood,” American Journal of Public Health 103 (2013): S318–23.

  4. During everyday conversation, people in the trailer park and the inner city claimed to have no friends or an abundance of them, to be surrounded by supportive kin or estranged from them. Oftentimes, depending on their mood, their accounts of social ties and support varied widely from one day to the next. I came to view these accounts skeptically, interpreting them as a kind of data in their own right but not as accurate evaluations of people’s social relationships. Problems arose not
only when determining who was in someone’s network but also when asking what those people did. Because giving increases your sense of self-worth and receiving diminishes it—ladling soup at the Salvation Army evokes a very different feeling from having it ladled into your bowl—there is good reason to expect people will overestimate the amount of support they give and underestimate the amount they receive. Ethnography allowed me to distinguish accounts of action from the action itself, and eviction, moreover, provided a unique occasion to compare what people said about the support they received from friends and family with support they actually received during that time of crisis. Eviction had a way of quickening ties, testing relationships, and revealing commitments, thereby drawing to the surface what was often submerged below the level of observation. Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2012): 1295–335.

  5. Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 93, 33, 43.

  6. Public programs like SSI and food stamps continue to incentivize living alone. If you live under another’s roof and eat at her or his table, your SSI income is reduced by one-third. Larger households receive more food stamps—but not as much as members of that household would receive if they lived separately. For example, a couple that registered as a household could receive a maximum of $347 a month to spend on food. A couple that registered separately could receive a maximum of $189 a month each, or $378 combined. With some exceptions, everyone living together must apply to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, rather than separately. See US Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Applicants and Recipients, December 30, 2013. On SSI living-arrangement requirements, see US Social Security Administration, “Simplifying the Supplemental Security Income Program: Options for Eliminating the Counting of In-Kind Support and Maintenance,” Social Security Bulletin 68 (November 4, 2008); Brendan O’Flaherty, Making Room: The Economics of Homelessness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 222. On kin dependence and AFDC, see M. Lisette Lopez and Carol Stack, “Social Capital and the Culture of Power: Lessons from the Field,” in Social Capital and Poor Communities, eds. Susan Saegert et al. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 31–59. Milwaukee renters receiving SSI have lower levels of crowding than their counterparts, even after controlling for income. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.

  7. When it came to meeting basic needs, poor kin had always been greater assets than middle-class relatives. See Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor”; Stack, All Our Kin, 77–78.

  8. Single mothers like Arleen could not make ends meet on welfare alone: on average, welfare, food stamps, and SSI payments covered only about three-fifths of single mothers’ expenses. Even after attempting to make up the difference by working side jobs and seeking help from agencies, many endured severe hardship, going hungry or forgoing winter clothing and medical care. Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997).

  9. See, for example, Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), 73; Sandra Susan Smith, Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism Among the Black Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007). For an extended treatment, see Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor.” Other ethnographers have documented similar network dynamics in poor neighborhoods: see Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 163–65, 182; Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls, 73. Of course, these dynamics can be observed at all levels of society. The tendency to rely on perfect strangers for emotional comfort, for example, is fairly common among the middle class, as evidenced by the so-called “stranger on a plane” phenomenon. Although poor people’s strategy of relying on disposable ties is not different in kind from the tendency of rich people to rely on strangers, it often is different in degree. It is only the poor who routinely rely on disposable ties to meet basic human needs.

  10. People see neighborhoods as much more than school districts and the usual ecological indicators. They see things much too personal to quantify but powerful enough to attract them to or repel them from entire sections of the city.

  11. Crystal had allowed her food stamps to lapse after her grandmother died the year before. She remembered her grandmother’s death causing her to fall into a dark depression. “I didn’t do shit. Sleep all day. Get in the shower. Eat. Go back in the house and go back to sleep. I shut down—on everything and everybody.” It was another example of how a trauma exacerbated poverty.

  12. That is, Crystal used an insult in place of Jori’s name.

  13. E-24

  1. On the North Side, white landlords often hired black property managers. Said Sherrena, “There’s a lot of white boys [who] come down from Brookfield here, and they buy all this inner-city shit….And they will hire a black property manager to handle things for them….The white boy will hire a black guy, maybe that looks a little mean and can keep up stuff, and they’ll bawl ’em. It’s easy.” Sherrena meant the property manager would not hesitate to yell at tenants (“bawl them out”) if they didn’t pay up. See Jennifer Lee, “Cultural Brokers: Race-Based Hiring in Inner-City Neighborhoods,” American Behavioral Scientist 41 (1998): 927–37.

  2. Mortgage and release records were retrieved from the Milwaukee County Register of Deeds.

  3. Tobin and Lenny’s rent records showed that during most months five trailers sat empty and forty tenants were behind, the average amount owed in a month being $340. Five vacancies a month left 126 trailers paying an average of $550 in monthly rent. Subtract from that total missed rent payments in the amount of $163,200 (40 × $340 × 12). This reduction was probably too drastic for two reasons. First, Tobin did not carry out anything close to forty evictions a month; so most people found a way to satisfy their debts. Second, missing payment estimates were based on summer-month totals (the trailer park’s rent rolls from April to July 2008) when nonpayments and evictions spiked. Nevertheless, I have kept these likely inflated reductions to generate a conservative estimate. Tobin’s overhead consisted of Lenny and Susie, whose combined annual salaries and rent reductions ran just shy of $50,000. Lenny’s annual salary and rent waiver totaled $42,600 ($36,000 + $6,600), and Susie’s salary and rent reduction totaled $6,400. (Tobin considered Susie a part-time employee, whom he paid $5 an hour for twenty hours a week; or: [$5/hr × 20 hours × 52] + $1,200 in reduced rent.) With respect to maintenance, all but twenty trailers were “owned,” which meant tenants footed most repair bills. Estimated regular maintenance costs rarely exceeded $5,000 a month, even after accounting for money paid for grass cutting and litter pickup. But I have kept this likely inflated estimate as well. Tobin’s property taxes were $49,457 in 2008, and his water bill was $26,708 that year. (Both figures were pulled from public records.) Tenants paid gas and electricity. Eviction court costs? Tobin averaged three formal evictions a month, and didn’t use a lawyer unless cases got tricky, which would mean he paid less than $7,000 a year in eviction court, sheriff, and lawyer fees. (If Tobin evicted an average of three tenants a month, then his annual baseline court costs could come to $3,222 [$89.50 × 3 cases × 12 months]. I doubled that number to account for irregular sheriff, mover, and lawyer fees and rounded up to $7,000.) Trash? Lenny told me that the bill for managing the two Dumpsters ran $800 a month (or $9,600 a year). Lighting? Tobin paid for the outdoor lighting (installed to utility poles) that lit the trailer park at night. Using We Energies standard rates, I budgeted $5,000 a year for this expense (plus the office’s electricity bill). Incidentals? I budgeted an additional $15,000 for advertisements and Lenny’s rent-collection bonuses. That leaves $446,635 a year. I excluded large, one-time maintenance expenses from this calculation—like when Tobin had speed bumps installed within the park—because they were rare and irregular. Lenny tho
ught my estimate was too low. He believed Tobin took home “more like six hundred thousand” a year.

  14. HIGH TOLERANCE

  1. John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee, 3rd ed. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2008 [1999]), 174.

  2. In my experience, disadvantaged neighborhoods were characterized not by the presence of an “oppositional culture” as much as by a palpable lack of one.

  3. Robert Fogelson, The Great Rent Wars: New York, 1917–1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 85, 86.

  4. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979), 12, 4.

  5. Fogelson, Great Rent Wars, 88.

  6. This finding is based on a negative binomial regression model applied to the full Milwaukee Area Renters Study (2009–2011) sample. To measure “community support,” respondents were asked if they ever had helped someone in their current neighborhood (a) pay bills or buy groceries, (b) get a job, (c) fix their housing or car, (d) by supporting them emotionally, or (e) by watching their children. Neighborhood disadvantage was measured by a factor-loaded scale composed of median household income, violent crime rate, and the percentages of families below the poverty line, of the population under eighteen, of residents with less than a high school education, of residents receiving public assistance, and of vacant housing units. In a paper with Weihua An, I found neighborhood disadvantage to be positively associated with community support, net of income, education, residential mobility, race, age, gender, employment status, and network composition. Residents in disadvantaged neighborhoods with strong ties to homeowners and the college educated were just as likely to offer support to their neighbors as those who lacked such ties. This suggests the strong presence of local gift exchange in distressed neighborhoods, one relatively unaffected by the composition of people’s extended networks. See Matthew Desmond and Weihua An, “Neighborhood and Network Disadvantage Among Urban Renters,” Sociological Science 2 (2015): 329–50.