Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

Eviction had a way of causing not one move but two: a forced move into degrading and sometimes dangerous housing and an intentional move out of it.2 But the second move could be a while coming.

“The public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.” So wrote Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Jacobs believed that a prerequisite for this type of healthy and engaged community was the presence of people who simply were present, who looked after the neighborhood. She has been proved right: disadvantaged neighborhoods with higher levels of “collective efficacy”—the stuff of loosely linked neighbors who trust one another and share expectations about how to make their community better—have lower crime rates.3

A single eviction could destabilize multiple city blocks, not only the block from which a family was evicted but also the block to which it begrudgingly relocated. In this way, displacement contributed directly to what Jacobs called “perpetual slums,” churning environments with hi...

With Doreen’s eviction, Thirty-Second Street lost a steadying presence—someone who loved and invested in the neighborhood, who contributed to making the block safer—but Wright Street didn’t gain one.

Landlords were allowed to rent units with property code violations, and even units that did not meet “basic habitability requirements,” as long as they were up front about the problems.6

Doreen decided to deduct the $150 from her rent. When Sherrena responded by saying that would earn her an eviction notice, Doreen went ahead and withheld all her rent. If she was going to get evicted, she might as well save her money to put it toward the next move.7 It was a common strategy among cash-strapped renters. Because the rent took almost all of their paycheck, families sometimes had to initiate a necessary eviction that allowed them to save enough money to move to another place. One landlord’s loss was another’s gain.8

At the time, median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee was $600. Ten percent of units rented at or below $480, and 10 percent rented at or above $750.9 A mere $270 separated some of the cheapest units in the city from some of the most expensive. That meant that rent in some of the worst neighborhoods was not drastically cheaper than rent in much better areas. For example, in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where at least 40 percent of families lived below the poverty line, median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was only $50 less than the citywide median.10

When tenements began appearing in New York City in the mid-1800s, rent in the worst slums was 30 percent higher than in uptown. In the 1920s and ’30s, rent for dilapidated housing in the black ghettos of Milwaukee and Philadelphia and other northern cities exceeded that for better housing in white neighborhoods.

As late as 1960, rent in major cities was higher for blacks than for whites in similar accommodations.11 The poor did not crowd into slums because of cheap housing. They were there—and this was especially true of the black poor—simply because they were allowed to be.

Landlords at the bottom of the market generally did not lower rents to meet demand and avoid the costs of all those missed payments and evictions. There were costs to avoiding those costs too. For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetu...

Tenants able to pay their rent in full each month could take advantage of legal protections designed to keep their housing safe and decent. Not only could they summon a building inspector without fear of eviction, but they also had...

But when tenants fell behind, these protections dissolved. Tenants in arrears were barred from withholding or escrowing rent; and they tempted eviction if they filed a report with a building inspector. It was not that low-income renters didn’...

When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond by neglecting repairs. Or as Sherrena put it to tenants: “If I give you a break, you give me a break.” Tenants could trade their dignity and children’s health for a roof over their head.13

Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem.14 More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems—as were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did not.15

Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted. But from a business point of view, this arrangement could be lucrative. The four-family property that included Doreen’s and Lamar’s apartments was Sherrena’s most profitable. Her second-most profitable property was Arleen’s place on T...

Funded by the Department of Justice, the Landlord Training Program began in the 1990s with the goal of “keeping illegal and destructive activity out of rental property.”5

Karen told the room to collect an applicant’s date of birth (to check his or her criminal record) and Social Security number (to check his or her credit) and to require two pieces of identification. “You need to require sufficient and verifiable income. If they say they are self-employed, well, drug dealers are self-employed.”

Herself a landlord, Karen paid attention to how someone looked at her unit. This point was repeated in the thick training manual landlords received at registration: “Do they check out each room?…Do they mentally visualize where the furniture will go, which room the children will sleep in, or how they’ll make best use of the kitchen layout? Or do they barely walk in the front door before asking to rent, showing a surprising lack of interest in the details? People who make an honest living care about their home and often show it in the way they look at the unit. Some who rent for illegal operations forget to pretend they have the same interest.”8

The small act of screening could have big consequences. From thousands of yes/no decisions emerged a geography of advantage and disadvantage that characterized the modern American city: good schools and failing ones, safe streets and dangerous ones.9 Landlords were major players in distributing the spoils. They decided who got to live where. And their screening practices (or lack thereof) revealed why crime and gang activity or an area’s civic engagement and its spirit of neighborliness could vary drastically from one block to the next. They also helped explain why on the same block in the same low-income neighborhood, one apartment complex but not another became familiar to the police.10

Screening practices that banned criminality and poverty in the same stroke drew poor families shoulder to shoulder with drug dealers, sex offenders, and other lawbreakers in places with lenient requirements. Neighborhoods marred by high poverty and crime were that way not only because poverty could incite crime, and crime could invite poverty, but also because the techniques landlords used to “keep illegal and destructive activity out of rental property” kept poverty out as well. This also meant that violence, drug activity, deep ...

Some landlords neglected to screen tenants for the same reason payday lenders offered unsecured, high-interest loans to families with unpaid debt or lousy credit; for the same reason that the subprime industry gave mortgages to people who could not afford them; for the same reason Rent-A-Center allowed you to take home a new Hisense air conditioner or Klaussner “Lazarus” reclining sofa without running a credit check. There was a business model at the bottom of every market.11

Earlier in the month, she had filed the paperwork and received a court date of December 23, which would be the last eviction court before Christmas that year. Sherrena knew the courthouse would be packed. Many parents chose to take their chances with their landlords rather than face their children empty-handed on Christmas morning.1

A new tenant had already asked Sherrena if a portion of her rent money could be returned so she could buy gifts. Sherrena told her, “You gotta have a house to put the Christmas tree and presents in….You’ve been knowing Christmas was coming eleven months ago.”

One, a white man in a leather jacket who had been in the local paper a few months back for racking up hundreds of property violations, was joking with his young female assistant when a tenant approached. The tenant was a black woman, likely in her fifties. Her shoulders were uplifted under her worn overcoat. She reached into her purse and handed the landlord $700 in cash. “I’m hoping—” she began. The landlord cut her off. “Don’t hope. Write the check.” “I can get you another six hundred in two weeks.” The landlord asked her to sign a stipulation, which included a $55 late fee. She reached for his pen.3

Roughly 70 percent of tenants summoned to Milwaukee’s eviction court didn’t come. The same was true in other major cities. In some urban courts, only 1 tenant in 10 showed.4 Some tenants couldn’t miss work or couldn’t find child care or were confused by the whole process or couldn’t care less or would rather avoid the humiliation.5 When tenants did not show up and their landlord or a representative did, the caller applied three quick stamps to the file—indicating that the tenant had received a default eviction judgment—and placed it on top of a growing pile.

Tenants in eviction court were generally poor, and almost all of them (92 percent) had missed rent payments. The majority spent at least half their household income on rent. One-third devoted at least 80 percent to it.6 Of the tenants who did come to court and were evicted, only 1 in 6 had another place lined up: shelters or the apartments of friends or family. A few resigned themselves to the streets. Most simply did not know where they would go.7

As usual, the courtroom was full of black women. In a typical month, 3 in 4 people in Milwaukee eviction court were black. Of those, 3 in 4 were women. The total number of black women in eviction court exceeded that of all other groups combined.8

In Milwaukee’s poorest black neighborhoods, eviction had become commonplace—especially for women. In those neighborhoods, 1 female renter in 17 was evicted through the court system each year, which was twice as often as men from those neighborhoods and nine times as often as women from the city’s poorest white areas. Women from black neighborhoods made up 9 percent of Milwaukee’s population and 30 percent of its evicted tenants.9

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.10

Patrice had gone to work at Cousins Subs instead of going to court. She couldn’t find anyone who would swap hours, and she didn’t want to lose this job. Her manager had looked past her Class A misdemeanor (writing bad checks).

Patrice knew that if she did come to court she not only would lose work hours and frustrate her manager but also would have to defend herself against someone who was more educated, more familiar with the law, and more comfortable in court. Other tenants had it worse, having to go toe to toe with their landlords’ lawyer.

Each eviction case had two parts. The “first cause of action” dealt strictly with whether a tenant would be evicted. Next came “the second and third causes of action,” which dealt with what was owed to a landlord: unpaid rent, court fees, and other damages.12

Most tenants taken to eviction court were sued twice—once for the property and a second time for the debt—and so had two court dates. But even fewer tenants showed up for their second hearing than for their first, which meant landlords’ claims about what was owed them usually went unchallenged. Suing a tenant for back rent and court fees was straightforward. Landlords were allowed to charge for unpaid rent, late fees the court found reasonable, and double rent for each day tenants remained in the home after their tenancy had been terminated.

Sherrena knew that receiving a money judgment and actually receiving the money were different matters. After withholding tenants’ security deposits, landlords had limited recourse when it came to collecting. Sherrena could try to garnish wages, but this was possible only for former tenants who were employed and living above the poverty line. She could garnish bank accounts. But many of her former tenants did not have bank accounts, and even if they did, state benefits and the first $1,000 were off limits.13

Even so, Sherrena and many other landlords filed for second and third causes. This carried consequences for tenants, since money judgments were listed on eviction records. An eviction record listing $200 of rental debt left a different impression than one listing $2,000.

Money judgments could also suddenly reappear in tenants’ lives several years after the eviction, particularly if landlords docketed them. Docketing a judgment slapped it on a tenant’s credit report. If the tenant came to own any property in Milwaukee County in the next decade, the docketed judgment placed a lien on...

To landlords, docketing a judgment was a long-odds bet on a tenant’s future. Who knows, maybe somewhere down the line a tenant would want to get her credit in order and would approach her old landlord, asking to repay the debt. “Debt with interest,” the landlord could respond, since money judgments accrued intere...

For the chronically and desperately poor whose credit was already wrecked, a docketed judgment was just another shove deeper into the pit. But for the tenant who went on to land a decent job or marry and then take another tentative step forward, applying for student loans or purchasing a first home—for that tenant,...

The self-described “largest and most aggressive landlord collection agency in the country” reported delinquent tenants to three national credit bureaus and placed them on a nationwide tracking system that allowed the company to follow tenants’ financial lives “without their knowledge.” It saw when tenants attempted to get credit, apply for a job, or open a bank account. Like landlords docketing judgments, the company took the long view, waiting for tenants to “get back on their financial feet and begin to earn a living” before collection could begin. Rent Recovery Service “never closed an unpaid file.”15

She knew that there were two main programs in Milwaukee for people facing eviction. The first was Emergency Assistance for families at risk of “impending homelessness.”

You could apply for these funds once every year if you were a US citizen, in possession of an eviction notice, at or below 115 percent of the poverty level, and could prove with divorce papers, a crime report, a pink slip, or some other documentation that you had experienced a sudden loss of income. But to qualify you also had to have dependent children in your home; so Emergency Assistance was out.

The second program was the Homelessness Prevention Program, offered through Community Advocates and mainly federally funded. But to qualify for that benefit, you not only had to have experienced a loss of income, you also had to demonstrate that your current income could cover future rents. Plus, you needed landlord buy-in, which Larraine didn’t have. Like Emergency Assistance, this service was reserved more for the unlucky—those who had been laid off or mugged—than the chronically rent burdened. Community Advoca...

Larraine did not dial the number to a tenants’ union because Milwaukee, like most American cities, didn’t have one.

The sheriff had ten days to remove the tenants. A formal eviction that involved sheriffs and movers could run around $600, when you included the court filing charge and process-server fee. Landlords could add these costs to a judgment but often never got them back.

Then there were cases that didn’t require any sort of psychological sophistication, cases where landlords purposefully conned or misled tenants.

The woman walked in circles, trying to think of where to begin. She told one of the deputies that she knew she was being foreclosed but that she didn’t know when they were coming. Her attorney had told her that it could be a day, five days, a week, three weeks; she decided to ride it out. She and her three children had been in the house for five years. The year before, she had been talked into refinancing with a subprime loan. Her payments kept going up, jumping from $920 to $1,250 a month, and her hours at Potawatomi Casino were cut back after her maternity leave.

Hispanic and African American neighborhoods had been targeted by the subprime lending industry: renters were lured into buying bad mortgages, and homeowners were encouraged to refinance under riskier terms. Then it all came crashing down. Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11 percent reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31 percent of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent.7

As the move went on, the woman slowed down. At first, she had borne down on the emergency with focus and energy, almost running through the house with one hand grabbing something and the other holding up the phone. Now she was wandering through the halls aimlessly, almost drunkenly. Her face had that look. The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours.

It was something like denial giving way to the surrealism of the scene: the speed and violence of it all; sheriffs leaning against your wall, hands resting on holsters; all these strangers, these sweating men, piling your things outside, drinking water from your sink poured into your cups, using your bathroom. It was the look of being undone by a wave of questions. What do I need for tonight, for this week? Who should I call? Where is the medication? Where will we go?