Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

Landlords and building managers weighed several factors when considering whether to evict a tenant. Tenants who could convince landlords that they had money coming down the pike, in the form of a tax refund, say, could avoid eviction. Tenants who fell too far behind without a clear way of getting caught up often could not.

But evictions were not simply the consequence of tenants’ misbehavior or landlords’ financial accounting. Landlords showed considerable discretion over whether to move forward with an eviction, extending leniency to some and withdrawing it from others.9 How a tenant responded to an eviction notice could make the difference. Women tended not to negotiate their eviction like men did, and they were more likely to avoid landlords when they fell behind.

Men often avoided eviction by laying concrete, patching roofs, or painting rooms for landlords. But women almost never approached their landlord with a similar offer.

Some women—already taxed by child care, welfare requirements, or work obligations—could not spare the time. But many others simply did not conceive of working off the rent as a possibility. When women did approach their landlords with such an offer, it sometimes involved trading sex for rent.11

Larraine would have to find a way to pay her storage bill. If she fell ninety days behind, Eagle would get rid of her pile to make room for a new one. This was the fate of roughly 70 percent of lots confiscated in evictions or foreclosures.

When the plumbing broke, the roof leaked, or rooms needed painting, savvy inner-city landlords did not phone plumbers, roofers, or painters. They relied on two desperate and on-hand labor pools: tenants themselves and jobless men. New landlords would speak of “knowing a good plumber.” Experienced landlords would say they “had a guy.”

Like many inner-city landlords, Sherrena and Quentin tried to limit the number of appliances in their units. If you didn’t include a stove or refrigerator, you didn’t have to fix it when it broke.

Workers could be found and replaced just like that. There was Sherrena’s brother, who had a crack habit, or Quentin’s uncle, Verne, a gummy-faced alcoholic happy to log hours for beer money. Tenants often asked for work; even Ricky One Leg had been calling. Plus, Sherrena had on call a crew of hypes—“jackleg crackheads,” she called them—willing to “work for peanuts.” In a pinch, Quentin sometimes recruited men right off the street. It wasn’t hard to do with so many men in the inner city out of work. Sherrena and Quentin provided tools, materials, and transportation. They paid workers by the task or the day. The amounts typically ranged from $6 to $10 an hour, depending on the job. “These people,” Sherrena once said, “no matter how much money it is, it’s money. And they will work, and they will work for low prices.”

Reported high rates of joblessness among black men with little education obscured the fact that many of these men did regularly work, if not in the formal labor market. Some hustling in the underground economy plied the illicit trades, but the biggest drug kingpin in the city would have been envious of the massive cash-paid labor force urban landlords had at their disposal.2

When the men left, Patrice and Natasha snuck upstairs to have a look. Seeing the freshly painted walls and floors, the women sucked their teeth. The new tenant (or at least her payee, Belinda) seemed to know what Patrice did not: your leverage as a renter was strongest before you moved in.

A few of Sherrena’s voice messages were from Tabatha, a social worker who made weekly visits to the Hinkstons’ house. When Sherrena returned her call, Tabatha cited the plumbing situation at Eighteenth and Wright and tried to advocate for some repairs. Not long after Doreen paid a plumber herself, the pipes backed up again. Sherrena was not hearing it.

“I can’t believe that you are on my phone complaining to me about the sink being stopped up when they’re the ones doing it!” Sherrena said. “They pull hinges off doors…have clothes piled to the ceiling. The whiff of shit hits you in the face when you open the door….I cannot believe that your organization is allowing her to have a house that looks like that.”

Then Tabatha made a mistake, telling Sherrena that Doreen was looking for another place. Sherrena got off the phone and headed for the courthouse. If Doreen was withholding rent so the family could move, Sherrena would call her bluff. Sherrena paid the fee and scheduled a court date, giving Doreen an open eviction on CCAP. Now moving would be much harder. If the Hinkstons were going to go, Sherrena decided, they would go on her terms.

They caught Ricky One Leg outside, waiting for UPS to deliver a computer for his daughter. “A computer?” Sherrena asked when Quentin climbed back in the Suburban. “Yeah.” Quentin smiled. “See. See! He got money for a new computer but not for the rent. That’s okay. ’Cause I got ’em. The rent’s going up.” Sherrena paused for effect. “Inflation!”1

Ladona had a housing voucher. Sherrena and Quentin didn’t accept rent assistance in most of their properties because they didn’t want to deal with the program’s picky inspectors. “Rent assistance is a pain in the ass,” Sherrena said. Voucher holders made up a small share of the market anyway—only 6 percent of renter households in the city—and were not worth the headache.

For each metropolitan area, the Department of Housing and Urban Development sets a Fair Market Rent (FMR): the most a landlord could charge a family in possession of a federal housing voucher.2 FMRs were calculated at the municipal level, which often included near and outlying suburbs. This meant that both distressed and exclusive neighborhoods were thrown into the equation.

New York City’s FMR calculation included SoHo and the South Bronx. Chicago’s included the Gold Coast and the South Side ghetto. This was by design, so that a family could take their voucher and find housing in safe and prosperous areas in the city or its surrounding suburbs.

But the program did not bring about large gains in racial or economic integration. Voucher holders more or less stayed put, upgrading to slightly nicer trailer parks or moving to quieter ghetto streets. It...

Because rents were higher in the suburbs than in the inner city, the FMR exceeded market rent in disadvantaged neighborhoods. When voucher holders lived in those neighborhoods, landlords could charge them more t...

In 2009, the year Ladona was hoping to move into Sherrena’s new property, the FMR for a four-bedroom unit in Milwaukee County was $1,089. But the average four-bedroom apartment in the city rented for much less: $6...

In Milwaukee, renters with housing vouchers were charged an average of $55 more each month, compared to unassisted renters who lived in similar apartments in similar neighborhoods. Overcharging voucher holders cost taxpayers an additional $3.6 million each year in Milwaukee alone—the equivalent of supplying 588 more needy families with housing assistance.6

A rent certificate program would be superior to public housing, they argued. Landlords and Realtors saw government-built and -managed buildings offered at cut-rate rents as a direct threat to their legitimacy and bottom line.8 At first, federal policymakers disagreed and at midcentury decided to fund the construction of massive public housing complexes. But real estate interests kept lobbying for vouchers and were joined by numerous other groups of various political persuasions, including civil rights activists who thought vouchers would advance racial integration.9

Eventually, after America’s public housing experiment was defunded and declared a failure (in that order), they would have their day. As housing projects were demolished, the voucher program grew into the nation’s largest housing subsidy program for low-income families. In policy circles, vouchers were known as a “public-private partnership.” In real estate circles, they were known as “a win.”

Since the foreclosure crisis, Sherrena had been buying properties throughout the North Side at a rate of about one a month.10 In some cities, as many as 1 in 2 foreclosures was renter-occupied. The crisis had provided landlords an almost magical opportunity. “This moment right now,” Sherrena reflected, “it’s going to create a lot of millionaires. You know, if you have money right now, you can profit from other people’s failures….I’m catching the properties. I’m catching ’em.”

“If you have money right now”—that was the rub. The mortgage sector had shriveled up during the financial downturn: in 2007 alone, the number of loan organizations fell by 25 percent.11 Fearing insolvency, banks still in operation turned into miserly lenders, instituting stricter lending standards, requiring pristine credit, and demanding large down payments. “If you want a loan this year,” the Washington Post reported, “you’re going to have to pay more—thousands of dollars more in some cases.”12

In January 2009, the Free Foreclosure List distributed to Milwaukee real estate investors displayed around 1,400 properties, each listing for “$30,000 or more below assessed value.” The properties were ordered from least to most expensive, beginning with a two-bedroom unit listed at $2,750. Ten properties down, there was a three-bedroom going for $8,900. Ten more down: a four-bedroom for $11,900.13

The same thing that made homeownership a bad investment in poor, black neighborhoods—depressed property values—made landlording there a potentially lucrative one. Property values for similar homes were double or triple in white, middle-class sections of the city; but rents in those neighborhoods were not.

A landlord might have been able to fetch $750 for a two-bedroom unit in the suburb of Wauwatosa and only $550 for a similar unit in Milwaukee’s poverty-stricken 53206 zip code. But the Wauwatosa property would have come with a much higher mortgage payment and tax bill, not to mention higher standards for the condition of the unit.

When it came to return on investment, it was hard to beat owning property in the inner city. “You buy on the North Side because they ‘cash flow’ nicely,” said one landlord with 114 central-city units. “In Brookfield, I lost money. But if you do low-income, you get a steady monthly income. You don’t buy prope...

Sherrena looked for properties that would give her a cash flow of at least $500 a month, after expenses. The house Ladona would rent easily cleared that bar. Sherrena owned it free and clear, the repairs only set her back $1,500, and the monthly rent would be $775. If the house inspired Sherrena to dance, it was because she knew she would recoup her total investment in about two years. She was used to this rate of return. Shortly after buying the black-and-white house, she bought a duplex off Keefe Avenue for $8,500, repairing it for $3,000. It would take only eight months to make that money back. After that, “it just cashed out.”

After paying the water bill, Sherrena—who owned three dozen inner-city units, all filled with tenants around or below the poverty line—figured she netted roughly $10,000 a month, more than what Arleen, Lamar, and many of her other tenants took home in a year.

Sherrena felt accomplished if unsurprised. On multiple occasions she had taken a tenant’s entire paycheck. Once, a young mother had offered Sherrena her debit card.

When Doreen told Patrice the reason Sherrena had given for the plumbing being neglected—Quentin had lent someone his truck for a month—Patrice rolled her eyes. “You’re in Jamaica,” she said, “and we can’t even take baths….All that money they got, she sound dumb. If I believe that, then slap me dead.”

Sherrena had seen some of her properties double in value during the housing bubble, and she knew the inflated assessments wouldn’t last forever. She was trying to sell a rent-to-own tenant one property for $90,000, a property she owned free and clear, having purchased it at a far lower price. Sherrena would reinvest the cash in more properties, and the new homeowner would inherit a massive debt. Sherrena would say that was better than not owning a house at all.

In years past, Sherrena had marketed her credit-repair-to-home-loan services to physically and mentally disabled people on SSI. “A whole bunch of those people came and bought houses. They ended up losing them, but the thing is they need to be policed a little bit more….Wasn’t nobody saying, ‘Johnny, pay your mortgage!’ They just may not have been mentally capable.”

They say the foreclosure crisis started on Wall Street, with men in power ties trading toxic assets and engineering credit default swaps. But in the ghetto, all you needed was a rapid rescore coach and a low-income tenant hungry for a shot at the American Dream.

When Crystal was sixteen, she stopped going to high school. When she turned seventeen, her caseworker began transitioning her out of the system. By that time, she had passed through more than twenty-five foster placements. Crystal was barred temporarily from low-income housing owing to her assault charge. But her caseworker arranged for her to move into an apartment subsidized by a child welfare agency.

To keep the apartment, Crystal had to find a job. But she was not the least bit interested in pulling half-day shifts at Quad Graphics or dropping onion rings at Burger King. She submitted a single application. Plus, having been approved for SSI on account of bipolar disorder, Crystal thought that her $754 monthly check was more reliable than any job she could get.

After eight months, the caseworker told Crystal she would have to leave the apartment. Crystal stepped out of foster care and into homelessness.3 She slept at shelters and on the street. She lived briefly with her...

But large-scale social transformations—the crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them—had frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit “kin dependence” by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.6

It was next to impossible for people to survive deep poverty on their own.8 If you could not rely on your family, you could reach out to strangers, make disposable ties. But it was a lot to ask of someone you barely knew.9

“You got the in fee, the out fee, and the first month’s storage,” the man said. “That adds up to three seventy-five. Then each month after that, it goes up another hundred and twenty-five.” The man suggested Larraine try to get her things out soon so she wouldn’t have to pay on another month. But having just given him what amounted to over half her SSI check, Larraine knew this was impossible. It would take her several months to save for a new apartment while still paying Beaker and Eagle.

In years past, renters opposed landlords and saw themselves as a “class” with shared interests and a unified purpose. During the early twentieth century, tenants organized against evictions and unsanitary conditions. When landlords raised rents too often or too steeply, tenants went so far as to stage rent strikes. Strikers joined together to withhold rent and form picket lines, risking eviction, arrest, and beatings by hired thugs.

They were not an especially radical bunch, these strikers. Most were ordinary mothers and fathers who believed landlords were entitled to modest rent increases and fair profits, but not “price gouging.” In New York City, the great rent wars of the Roaring Twenties forced a state legislature to impose rent controls that remain the country’s strongest to this day.3

Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them—which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.

During rent strikes, tenants believed they had a moral obligation to one another.5 If tenants resisted excessive rent hikes or unwarranted evictions, it was because they invested in their homes and neighborhoods. They felt they belonged there.

In the trailer park, that sentiment was almost dead. For most residents, Scott among them, the goal was to leave, not to plant roots and change things. Some residents described themselves as “just passing through,” even if they had been passing through nearly all their life. One, an out-of-work father of three who powered his trailer with stolen electricity, said, “W...

Poor neighborhoods provided their residents with quite a lot. In the trailer park, residents met people who knew how to pirate cable, when the best food pantries were open, and how to apply for SSI. All over the city, people who lived in distressed neighborhoods were more likely to help their neighbors pay bills, buy groceries, fix their car, or lend a hand in other ways, compared to their peers in better-off areas.6 These exchanges helped people on the receiving end meet basic material needs; and they helped those on the delivering end feel more fully human.

But for such vital exchanges to take place, residents had to make their needs known and acknowledge their failures. For Larraine to ask her neighbor if she could use her shower, she needed to explain that her gas had been shut off. That fact became public when she walked back to her trailer with wet hair. On another occasion, a tenant named Rose had her children taken by Child Protective Services. Trailer park residents sat beside her as she wailed. They comforted her and made sure she didn’t hurt herself, but because they saw what had happened, they also judged her. “It ain’t nothing to be proud of,” Dawn told her. “But the Lord took ’em for some reason.”7

Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma—believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addiction, and other harrowing events—were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives.9 This lack of faith had less to do with their neighborhood’s actual poverty and crime rates than with the level of concentrated suffering they perceived around them. A community that saw so clearly its own pain had a difficult time also sensing its potential.