Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

The first is that domestic-violence incidents often hide behind other police designations, antiseptic and context-barren, such as Property Damage (as when an ex-boyfriend kicks down the door) or Subject with Weapon (as when a husband uses a pair of box cutters on his wife). Domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking were not struck from Milwaukee’s original list of nuisance activities; they were never included in the list to begin with. Because the ordinance still lists things like battery, harassment, and misuse of emergency telephone numbers among its thirty-two permissible nuisances, these designations can still be applied to crimes of the home. A second problem with the city’s quick fix is that it relies on landlords, who have been threatened with hefty fines, to reveal if nuisance activities are domestic violence–related. Some will raise this issue with the police, and others will simply evict the tenant, implementing their own quick fix. Roughly 8 in 10 property owners abated nuisance activity, regardless of what it involved, by evicting tenants or by threatening them with eviction if the police were contacted again. One could propose a list of other improvements—more police training could help; cities could aim their ordinances only at drug activity or noise—but maybe this is a case where the hatchet is preferred to the scalpel. Not only can nuisance property ordinances do considerable harm, but they also reveal the extent to which local governments are willing...