Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  Studies have documented an association between crowding and adverse outcomes, but there is not much robust causal evidence of the effect of crowding. See Gary Evans, Susan Saegert, and Rebecca Harris, “Residential Density and Psychological Health Among Children in Low-Income Families,” Environment and Behavior 33 (2001): 165–80; Dominique Goux and Eric Maurin, “The Effect of Overcrowded Housing on Children’s Performance at School,” Journal of Public Economics 89 (2005): 797–819; Claudia Solari and Robert Mare, “Housing Crowding Effects on Children’s Well-Being,” Social Science Research 41 (2012): 464–76.

  25. Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 23.

  26. Louis Winnick, “The Triumph of Housing Allowance Programs: How a Fundamental Policy Conflict Was Resolved,” Cityscape 1 (1995): 95–118, 97. The quotation comes from the documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011), directed by Chad Freidrichs.

  27. Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (New York: Random House, 1991); Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  28. Public housing inventory has fallen by roughly 20 percent since 1991. Peter Marcuse and W. Dennis Keating, “The Permanent Housing Crisis: The Failures of Conservatism and the Limitations of Liberalism,” in A Right to Housing: Foundation for a New Social Agenda, eds. Rachel Bratt, Michael Stone, and Chester Hartman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 139–62; Rachel Bratt, Michael Stone, and Chester Hartman, “Why a Right to Housing Is Needed and Makes Sense: Editor’s Introduction,” ibid., 1–19; Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States.

  29. More technically, the voucher covers the remaining costs up to the “payment standard,” a limit set by the local Housing Authority administering the benefit. The program reserves 3 in 4 available vouchers for households with incomes below 30 percent of the area median income or the poverty line (whichever is higher); the remaining quarter may be distributed to households with incomes up to 80 percent of the area median.

  30. Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, America’s Rental Housing: Evolving Markets and Needs (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2013); Abt Associates Inc. et al., Effects of Housing Vouchers on Welfare Families (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2006); Michelle Wood, Jennifer Turnham, and Gregory Mills, “Housing Affordability and Family Well-Being: Results from the Housing Voucher Evaluation,” Housing Policy Debate 19 (2008): 367–412.

  31. Abt Associates Inc. et al., Effects of Housing Vouchers; Alan Meyers et al., “Public Housing Subsidies May Improve Poor Children’s Nutrition,” American Journal of Public Health 83 (1993): 115. See also Sandra Newman and Scott Holupka, “Housing Affordability and Investments in Children,” Journal of Housing Economics 24 (2014): 89–100.

  32. American Housing Survey, 2013, Table C-17-RO. These estimates excluded households classified as “other income verification” (3 percent of renter households below the poverty level) and “subsidy not reported” (1 percent of renter households below the poverty level) because it was unclear whether these households received assistance. Matthew Desmond, “Unaffordable America: Poverty, Housing, and Eviction,” Fast Focus: Institute for Research on Poverty 22 (2015): 1–6.

  33. On public housing capital needs, see Meryl Finkel et al., Capital Needs in the Public Housing Program, Contract # C-DEN-O2277-TO001, Revised Financial Report, prepared for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Cambridge: Abt Associates Inc., 2010).

  34. This estimate is consistent across multiple national data sets, including the American Housing Survey, the American Community Survey, the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Frederick Eggers and Fouad Moumen, Investigating Very High Rent Burdens Among Renters in the American Housing Survey (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2010).

  The problem of unaffordable housing is not America’s alone. Over the last several decades, millions of people around the world have migrated from rural villages and towns. In 1960, roughly one-third of the planet lived in urban areas; today, more than half does. Cities have experienced real income gains that have brought about global poverty reductions. But therein lies the rub, for the growth of cities also has been accompanied by an astonishing surge in land values and housing costs. Urban housing costs have risen around the globe, especially in “superstar cities” whose real-estate markets have experienced an influx of global capital, driving housing prices upward and crowding out low-income residents. In Lagos, Africa’s largest city, an estimated 60 percent of all residents dedicate the majority of their monthly income to rent, even as the majority of the city’s residents live in one-room dwellings. Rents in Delhi’s business district now rival those in midtown Manhattan. A recent report estimated that the global housing affordability gap amounts to $650 billion or 1 percent of the global GDP. Roughly 330 million urban households worldwide live in substandard or unaffordable housing demanding more than 30 percent of their income. By 2025, based on migration trends and global income projections, that number is expected to climb to 440 million households, representing 1.6 billion people. The world is becoming urbanized, and the city is becoming unaffordable to millions everywhere. See Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai, “Superstar Cities,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 5 (2013): 167–99; McKinsey Global Institute, A Blueprint for Addressing the Global Affordable Housing Challenge (New York: McKinsey, 2014); Pedro Olinto and Hiroki Uematsu, The State of the Poor: Where Are the Poor and Where Are They Poorest? (Washington, DC: World Bank, Poverty Reduction and Equity, 2013).

  35. Russell Engler, “Pursuing Access to Justice and Civil Right to Counsel in a Time of Economic Crisis,” Roger Williams University Law Review 15 (2010): 472–98; Russell Engler, “Connecting Self-Representation to Civil Gideon,” Fordham Urban Law Review 37 (2010): 36–92.

  36. D. James Greiner, Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak, and Jonathan Hennessy, “The Limits of Unbundled Legal Assistance: A Randomized Study in a Massachusetts District Court and Prospects for the Future,” Harvard Law Review 126 (2013): 901–89; Carroll Seron et al., “The Impact of Legal Counsel on Outcomes for Poor Tenants in New York City’s Housing Court: Results of a Randomized Experiment,” Law and Society Review 35 (2001): 419–34.

  37. Seedco, Housing Help Program, South Bronx, NYC (New York: Seedco Policy Center, 2009).

  38. Nearly half of all forced moves that take place among Milwaukee renters are informal evictions: off-the-books displacements not processed through the court. Since informal eviction is already landlords’ favored means to displace tenants, they might be more likely to resort to this strategy if poor families had access to counsel. Tenants could insist on a court hearing, but many prefer informal evictions because an official record does not accompany them. This is why any legal-aid initiative needs to consider current court recordkeeping practices.

  The legal system has been drastically changed by the recording and publication of its business: so much so that the threat of an eviction record is daily leveraged, both inside and outside the courtroom, by landlords and judges alike, to incentivize tenants to forfeit their right to be heard. Something has gone very wrong with our justice system when it makes more sense for tenants to skip court and quietly move out when their landlord says go than it does for them to plead their case themselves, which often leads to an order to move and an eviction on their record.

  Consider the case of Myesha and Chester, a poor black couple whose landlord had moved to evict them from a house riddled with dangerous and degrading problems. According to the tenants, the landlord had agreed to let them live in the house for free until she was able to fix it up. According to the landlord, no such bargain had been struck. What was not in dispute was the terrible condition of the house—there were exposed wires; in some rooms the floor was caving in; water flowed into the
house when it rained—photographs of which had led a commissioner to kick the case up to a judge. When the court date in front of the judge came, the landlord and her lawyer offered the tenants a stipulation agreement, which required that they move. But Myesha and Chester had two teenage girls in school and wanted to stay put and see the house repaired; so they were considering arguing their case in front of a jury. The judge explained their options like this: If they signed a stipulation and agreed to leave, “the eviction part [of the case the landlord] would dismiss. So on your record, which anyone can see, it wouldn’t say you were evicted….If you think you really have paid the rent or have some other reason that is a legal defense here, then you can tell me all about that. That’s your one choice. Your other choice would be to go ahead with some agreement that you’ll leave and save [the landlord] and ultimately yourself some headache. Because…if you fail to vacate after the lease no longer exists and if [the landlord] has to pay for the sheriff to come and actually move your things out to the street, then that’ll cost her money and she’ll just add that on to the balance that you owe. So, it’s a really tough, unfriendly, sorry, uncomfortable, terribly disruptive situation, when you’re put out like that.”

  “Just a question,” Chester said. “What if we had an agreement that we weren’t suppose to pay rent until she fixed stuff up?”

  “Then, well, have a trial and we’ll find out the truth and make that determination,” the judge responded.

  Myesha and Chester asked for a few minutes to talk things through. “We still gonna lose,” Myesha whispered. “It’s just how much we gonna lose.”

  They took the deal.

  Some people who have never been evicted or arrested like to say that accessible court records are necessary to promote “a free and open society.” Limiting access to court records, they argue, would pave the way for undemocratic state practices: secret police, undocumented arrests, hidden prisons, and God knows what else. Next to the concrete realities of how records are actually used to make families’ lives much harder, these abstract worries seem grossly out of touch. For millions of poor Americans, including those who have never committed a crime, court records severely constrict their opportunities. Let’s deal with the real problems we have, not the imaginary problems we don’t.

  39. Martha Davis, “Participation, Equality, and the Civil Right to Counsel: Lessons from Domestic and International Law,” Yale Law Journal 122 (2013): 2260–81; Raven Lidman, “Civil Gideon as a Human Right: Is the U.S. Going to Join Step with the Rest of the Developed World?,” Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review 15 (2006): 769–800.

  40. Quoted in Cass Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 3.

  41. Quoted in Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 215.

  42. “Exploitation” appears but twice in William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]), when Wilson summarizes orthodox Marxist accounts, and again twice in Wilson’s When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996), when he describes blacks’ aversion to it. In Loïc Wacquant’s Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), you can find four instances of “exploitation,” only one of which refers to the exploitation of the poor by the rich (page 123n7). The word makes a single appearance in Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), on page 176, in reference to sexual liaisons between inner-city residents; a single appearance in Sudhir Venkatesh’s American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), on page 150, in reference to housing project tenants being exploited by gangs; and a single appearance in Harrington’s The Other America (page 32). “Exploitation” does not appear at all in the pages of many other modern classics that take up the plight of the poor, from Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein’s Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997) to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Random House, 2012).

  43. On food prices in poor neighborhoods, see Chanjin Chung and Samuel Myers, “Do the Poor Pay More for Food? An Analysis of Grocery Store Availability and Food Price Disparities,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 33 (1999): 276–96; Marianne Bitler and Steven Haider, “An Economic View of Food Deserts in the United States,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 30 (2011): 153–76.

  44. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2008), 40; Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 237–38; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 30; Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 88–133. Of all people, Daniel Patrick Moynihan recognized the central importance of exploitation to understanding racialized urban poverty. In his report to the US Department of Labor that would later become infamous, Moynihan wrote: “The Negro situation is commonly perceived by whites in terms of the visible manifestation of discrimination and poverty….It is more difficult, however, for whites to perceive the effect that three centuries of exploitation have had on the fabric of Negro society itself….Here is where the true injury has occurred: unless this damage is repaired, all the effort to end discrimination and poverty and injustice will come to little.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, 1965).

  45. This point is indebted to Satter’s Family Properties.

  46. On rip-off schemes, see Alan Andreasen, The Disadvantaged Consumer (New York: The Free Press, 1975); Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: Norton, 2010), 20; David Caplovitz, The Poor Pay More (New York: The Free Press, 1967). On payday loans, see Pew Charitable Trust, Payday Lending in America: Who Borrows, Where They Borrow, and Why (Washington, DC: Pew, July 19, 2012); Gary Rivlin, Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. (New York: Harper, 2010).

  47. On markets being embedded in state and social relations, see Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985): 481–510; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [1944]). On the relationship between poverty and policing, see Megan Comfort, “When Prison Is a Refuge: America’s Messed Up,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2013; David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006); Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

  48. Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1948), 238.

  49. Katie Dodd, Quarterly Benefits Summary (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Department for Work and Pensions, 2015); Hugo Priemus, Peter Kemp, and David Varady, “Housing Vouchers in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands: Current Issues and Future Perspectives,” Housing Policy Debate 16 (2005): 575–609; “Housing Benefit: How Does It Work?,” BBC News, November 9, 2011.

  50. No study has shown that, compared to housing vouchers, project-based assistance can deliver housing at equal quality for less cost. On
the cost of public housing compared to vouchers, see Janet Currie, The Invisible Safety Net: Protecting the Nation’s Poor Children and Families (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chapter 4; Amy Cutts and Edgar Olsen, “Are Section 8 Housing Subsidies Too High?,” Journal of Housing Economics 11 (2002): 214–43.

  On neighborhood quality of voucher holders compared to public housing residents, see Sandra Newman and Ann Schnare, “ ‘…And a Suitable Living Environment’: The Failure of Housing Programs to Deliver on Neighborhood Quality,” Housing Policy Debate 8 (1997): 703–41; Edgar Olsen, “Housing Programs for Low-Income Households,” in Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States, ed. Robert Moffitt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 365–442.

  51. Brian Jacob and Jens Ludwig, “The Effects of Housing Assistance on Labor Supply: Evidence from a Voucher Lottery,” American Economic Review 102 (2012): 272–304; Mark Shroder, “Does Housing Assistance Perversely Affect Self-Sufficiency? A Review Essay,” Journal of Housing Economics 11 (2002): 381–417; Sandra Newman, Scott Holupka, and Joseph Harkness, “The Long-Term Effects of Housing Assistance on Work and Welfare,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 28 (2009): 81–101.

  52. Tellingly, countries with universal housing programs do not have minimum housing standards like America’s limited voucher program does. When everyone in the country can afford decent housing, you don’t need minimum standards because empowered renters can take their voucher elsewhere. Priemus et al., “Housing Vouchers in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands,” 582.