Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

If court records usually listed only leaseholders, it could be the case that women from poor black neighborhoods actually weren’t evicted at higher rates than men but were just more likely to collect eviction records than their male counterparts who lived in apartments off lease. Yet in black neighborhoods, a gender gap in formal evictions remained even after accounting for adults not listed on the lease. The Milwaukee Eviction Court Study (2011) accounted for all adults in the household, including those not listed on the Summons and Complaint. After doing so, black women continued to outnumber all other groups. They accounted for half of all adults living in households appearing in eviction court and 44 percent living in households that received eviction judgments. Black women were not only “marked” by eviction at higher rates; they were actually displaced at higher rates as well. A clerical tick did not explain away the high rate of eviction among black women. Another consideration: in the inner city, women had a harder time making rent than male leaseholders. Although many black men were closed off from the workforce, those with jobs worked longer hours and got paid better wages than black women workers. In 2010, the median annual income for full-time workers in Milwaukee was $33,010 for black men and $29,454 for black women—a difference equivalent to five months of rent for the average Milwaukee apartment. Many women in the inner city also had more expenses.