Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

In Milwaukee’s poorest black neighborhoods, 1 male renter in 33 was evicted through the court system each year, compared to 1 male renter in 134 and 1 female renter in 150 in the city’s poorest white neighborhoods. By “poorest neighborhoods,” I mean census block groups in which at least 40 percent of families lived below the poverty line. By “white/black neighborhoods,” I mean block groups in which at least two-thirds of the residents were white/black. Because eviction records do not include sex identifiers, two methods were employed to impute sex. First, a pair of research assistants assigned a sex to each person—over 90,000 of them—based on first names. Second, with the help of Felix Elwert, I imputed gender by drawing on Social Security card applications for US births. Each method produced virtually identical point estimates. An annual household eviction rate was calculated by dividing the number of eviction cases in a year by the number of occupied rental units estimated for that year. Additionally, for each neighborhood (block group), I estimated the eviction rate for male and female renters by dividing the number of evictees of one sex by the number of adults of the same sex living in rental housing. All statistics were calculated for each block group for each year. The results were then pooled and annual averages calculated. For a fuller explanation of the methods used to arrive at these estimates, see Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty.”