Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

For the first time in the history of America, New Deal policies made homeownership a real possibility for white families, but black families were denied these benefits when the federal government deemed their neighborhoods too risky for insured mortgages and officials loyal to Jim Crow blocked black veterans from using GI mortgages.20 Over three centuries of systematic dispossession from the land...

In the 1950s, white real estate brokers developed an advanced technique of exploitation, one that targeted black families shut out of the private housing market. After buying houses on the cheap from nervous white homeowners in transitioning neighborhoods, private investors would sell these hou...

Black buyers had to come up with sizeable down payments, often upwards of 25 percent of the property’s inflated value. Once they moved in, black families had all the responsibilities of home ownership without any of the rights. When families missed payments, which many did after monthly installments were increased or necessary housing upkeep set ...

The profits were staggering. In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landl...

The 1968 Civil Rights Act made housing discrimination illegal, but subtler forms prevailed. Crystal and Vanetta wanted to leave the ghetto, but landlords like the one on Fifteenth Street turned them away. Other landlords and property management companies—like Affordable Rentals—tried to avoid discriminating by setting clear criteria and holding all applicants to the same standards.

But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans.

Eviction itself often explained why some families lived on safe streets and others on dangerous ones, why some children attended good schools and others failing ones. The trauma of being forced from your home, the blemish of an eviction record, and the taxing rush to locate a new place to live pushed evicted renters into more depressed and dangerous areas of the city.23

The Hinkstons expected more of their landlord for the money they were paying her. Rent was their biggest expense by far, and they wanted a decent and functional home in return. They wanted things to be fixed when they broke. But if Sherrena wasn’t going to repair her own property, neither were they. The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house.2

The worse the Hinkstons’ house got, the more everyone seemed to become withdrawn and lethargic, which only deepened the problem. Natasha started spending more time at Malik’s. Doreen stopped cooking, and the children ate cereal for dinner. Patrice slept more. The children’s grades dropped, and Mikey’s teacher called saying he might have to repeat, mainly because of so many missed homework assignments. Everyone had stopped cleaning up, and trash spread over the kitchen floor.

Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health: not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what li...

It was once said that the poor are “constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.”3 Especially for poor African American families—who live in neighborhoods with rates of violence and concentrated poverty so extreme that even the worst white neighborhoods bear little resemblance—living in degrading housing in dangerous neighborhoods sent a clear message about where the wider society thought they belonged.4

Growing up in a shack in the ghetto meant learning how to endure such an environment while also learning that some people never had to. People who were repulsed by their home, who felt they had no control over it, and yet had to give most of their income to it—they thought less of themselves.5

The older children found some reprieve from the apartment in the public library on Center Street. C.J., Ruby, and Mikey liked playing on the computer best.

Doreen or Patrice could have walked to the library and searched for new housing on the Internet. But they never did. This was partially because paying Sherrena back meant they didn’t have enough money to move; partially because like most black renters they didn’t search for housing online; and partially because the family had sunk into a hazy depression.

Patrice could feel the house sucking their energy. “We just hit a mud hole with this house,” she said. “No one’s trying to get better. Makes me not want to get better. If you’re around people every day that doesn’t want to do anything, eventually you will feel like doing nothing.”

She remembered those calls and what had happened after she kicked D’Sean out. He returned later, drunk, smashed the door down, and beat her. After that incident, Vanetta remembered the landlord taking her rent money with one hand and handing her a twenty-eight-day “no cause” eviction notice with the other.

Then there was Kendal’s upcoming preschool graduation. Vanetta wanted to somehow find money to buy him a new pair of shoes for the big day. She wanted him to feel special, accomplished. In the inner city, much was made of early milestones. Later ones might never come.

“Momma,” Kendal said, “kids aren’t supposed to go to court. They’re supposed to go to day care and school.” He wasn’t pouting. He was observing some strangeness in the world, a misalignment.

Finally, it was the judge’s turn. An older white man, he began to recap what he had just heard. “So this was a general discussion about the nature of this offense, basically, that it was an aberration…a crime of desperation. I look at that. But I’m also mindful of the fact that between then and now nothing has really changed….I’m saying that the overall economic situation hasn’t improved. Has it, Counsel?” “No,” the public defender answered. He had argued that Vanetta had been looking for work. He hadn’t pointed out that Vanetta rose at five each morning but still had little time to find a job between searching for a new place to live, attending GED classes, and caring for her children—or that employers usually did not hire people who had recently confessed to committing a felony. “No,” the judge repeated. “And, quite honestly, I don’t know that it got any better after that time, maybe a little worse, based upon what’s occurred and the fact that she’s kicked around and moved around.”

What the judge was saying, in essence, was: We all agree that you were poor and scared when you did this violent, hurtful thing, and if you had been allowed to go on working five days a week at Old Country Buffet, refilling soup pots and mopping up frozen yogurt spills, none of us would be here right now. You might have been able to save enough to move to an apartment that was de-leaded and clean in a neighborhood without drug dealers and with safe schools. With time, you may have been able to get Bo-Bo the medical treatment he needs for his seizures, and maybe you could have even started taking night classes to become a nurse, like you always wanted.

But that’s not what happened. What happened was that your hours were cut, and your electricity was about to be shut off, and you and your children were about to be thrown out of your home, and you snatched someone’s purse as your friend pointed a gun at her face. And if it was poverty that caused this crime, who’s to say you won’t do it again? Because you were poor then and you are poor now. We all see the underlying cause, we see it every day in this court, but the justice system is no charity, no jobs program, no Housing Authority. If we cannot pull the weed up from the roots, then at least we can cut it low at the stem.

Crystal had always believed that SSI was a more secure income source than a paycheck. You couldn’t get fired from SSI; your hours couldn’t get cut. “SSI always come,” she said. Until one day it didn’t. She had been approved for SSI as a minor, but her adult reevaluation found her ineligible. Now Crystal’s only source of income came from food stamps.4

Because she didn’t know what else to do, Crystal went “on the stroll” and began selling sex. She had never been a morning person but soon learned that it was the best time to turn tricks, catching men on their way to work.

The phone rang, and Arleen thought about what she had told Pana. She had lied about her income, saying she received $250 a month in child support, but had been straight about her evictions. Mainly, she had begged him. She told him she’d take the unit before looking at it. She didn’t much consider the neighborhood or the condition of the place. “Whatever I get is whatever I get,” she figured. She had said, “I’m in a shelter. Please.”

Arleen saw school as a higher-order need, something to worry about after she found a house. Plus, Jori was a big help. He would bound down the street and memorize numbers off rent signs or watch Jafaris when Arleen left with her HOUSE notepad.

Poverty could pile on; living it often meant steering through gnarled thickets of interconnected misfortunes and trying not to go crazy. There were moments of calm, but life on balance was facing one crisis after another.

Children didn’t shield families from eviction; they exposed them to it.2

In languages spoken all over the world, the word for “home” encompasses not just shelter but warmth, safety, family—the womb. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for “home” was often used in place of “mother.” The Chinese word jiā can mean both family and home. “Shelter” comes from two Old English words: scield (shield) and truma (troop), together forming the image of a family gathering itself within a protective shell.1 The home remains the primary basis of life. It is where meals are shared, quiet habits formed, dreams confessed, traditions created.

America is supposed to be a place where you can better yourself, your family, and your community. But this is only possible if you have a stable home. When Scott was provided with an affordable apartment through the Guest House’s permanent housing program, he was able to stay off heroin, find meaningful work as a resident manager for homeless people, and begin striving for independence. He remains stably housed and sober. And then there are the Hinkstons. After Malik Jr. was born, Patrice and Doreen finally did move to Brownsville, Tennessee, a town of about 10,000. They found a nice three-bedroom place. Out of the rat hole, Patrice earned her GED, impressing her teacher so much that she was named Adult Learner of the Year. Patrice went on to enroll in a local community college, where she took online classes in computers and criminal justice, hoping to one day become a parole officer.

The persistence and brutality of American poverty can be disheartening, leaving us cynical about solutions. But as Scott and Patrice will tell you, a good home can serve as the sturdiest of footholds. When people have a place to live, they become better parents, workers, and citizens.

If Arleen and Vanetta didn’t have to dedicate 70 or 80 percent of their income to rent, they could keep their kids fed and clothed and off the streets. They could settle down in one neighborhood and enroll their children in one school, providing them the opportunity to form long-lasting relationships with friends, role models, and teachers. They could start a savings account or buy their children toys and books, perhaps even a home computer. The time and emotional energy they spent making rent, delaying eviction, or finding another place to live when homeless could instead be spent on things that enriched their lives: community college classes, exercise, finding a good job, maybe a good man too.

For years, social scientists, journalists, and policymakers all but ignored eviction, making it one of the least studied processes affecting the lives of poor families. But new data and methods have allowed us to measure the prevalence of eviction and document its effects. We have learned that eviction is commonplace in poor neighborhoods and that it exacts a heavy toll on families, communities, and children.

Residential stability begets a kind of psychological stability, which allows people to invest in their home and social relationships. It begets school stability, which increases the chances that children will excel and graduate. And it begets community stability, which encourages neighbors to form strong bonds and take care of their block.7 But poor families enjoy little of that because they are evicted at such high rates.

Between 2009 and 2011, roughly a quarter of all moves undertaken by Milwaukee’s poorest renters were involuntary. Once you account for those dislocations (eviction, landlord foreclosure), low-income households move at a similar rate as everyone else.9

If you study eviction court records in other cities, you arrive at similarly startling numbers. Jackson County, Missouri, which includes half of Kansas City, saw 19 formal evictions a day between 2009 and 2013. New York City courts saw almost 80 nonpayment evictions a day in 2012. That same year, 1 in 9 occupied rental households in Cleveland, and 1 in 14 in Chicago, were summoned to eviction court.10 Instability is not inherent to poverty. Poor families move so much because they are forced to.

Along with instability, eviction also causes loss. Families lose not only their home, school, and neighborhood but also their possessions: furniture, clothes, books. It takes a good amount of money and...

Eviction can cause workers to lose their jobs. The likelihood of being laid off is roughly 15 percent higher for workers who have experienced an eviction. If housing instability leads to employment instability, it is because the stress and consuming nature of b...

Often, evicted families also lose the opportunity to benefit from public housing because Housing Authorities count evictions and unpaid debt as strikes when reviewing applications. And so people who have the greatest need for housing assista...

This—the loss of your possessions, job, home, and access to government aid—helps explain why eviction has such a pronounced effect on what social scientists call “material hardship,” a measure of the texture of scarcity.

Material hardship assesses, say, whether families experience hunger or sickness because food or medical care is financially out of reach or go without heat, electricity, or a phone because they can’t afford those things.

The year after eviction, families experience 20 percent higher levels of material hardship than similar families who were not evicted. They go without food. They endure illness and cold. Evicted families continue to have higher lev...

These families are often compelled to accept substandard housing conditions. In Milwaukee, renters whose previous move was involuntary were 25 percent more likely to experience long-term housing problems than sim...

And families forced from their homes are pushed into undesirable parts of the city, moving from poor neighborhoods into even poorer ones; from crime-fi...

Even after controlling for a host of important factors, families who experience a forced move relocate to worse neighborhoods than those who move under less demanding circumstances.15 Concentrated poverty and violence inflict their own wounds, since neighborhoods determine so much about your life, from the kinds of job opportunities you have to the kinds of schools your children attend.16

Then there is the toll eviction takes on a person’s spirit. The violence of displacement can drive people to depression and, in extreme cases, even suicide. One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers.17

When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a “significant precursor of suicide.” The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. “Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.” Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.18

Eviction even affects the communities that displaced families leave behind. Neighbors who cooperate with and trust one another can make their streets safer and more prosperous. But that takes time. Efforts to establish local cohesion and community ...

In this way, eviction can unravel the fabric of a community, helping to ensure that neighbors remain strangers and that their collective capacity to combat crime and...

Milwaukee neighborhoods with high eviction rates have higher violent crime rates the following year, even after controlling for past cri...

Losing your home and possessions and often your job; being stamped with an eviction record and denied government housing assistance; relocating to degrading housing in poor and dangerous neighborhoods; and suffering from increased material hardship, homelessness, depression, and illness—this is eviction’s fallout. Eviction does not simply drop poor families into a dark valley, a trying yet relatively brief detour on life’...