Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

Most work on the underground economy focuses on the drug trade or sex work. But for every kid slinging dope or every prostitute on the stroll, there must be dozens and dozens of formally unemployed men working for cash or reduced rent, preparing landlords’ properties. On the blurry line separating the formal and informal economy in American cities, see Sudhir Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

During the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, respondents were asked: “What two words would best describe your landlord?” Two independent coders assigned a value to each word, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. Words like “slumlord” and “asshole” were assigned 1’s and words like “excellent” and “loving” were assigned 10’s. More muted critiques or compliments were assigned a midrange value. The coders’ scores were then averaged to produce an overall rating. The average renter in Milwaukee, according to this ranking, sees her or his landlord as a 6. Renters with extreme housing burden did not rate their landlord better or worse than other renters did. But those who experienced housing problems saw their landlord in a significantly more negative light.

Tenants did bind together upon learning that the trailer park might be shut down; this was their “extraordinary moment.” But after that moment passed, things went back to normal. They did not question the rent, fight for better housing conditions, or assign a political narrative to evictions. Their quibble had been with their alderman, not their landlord. Once, tenants did circulate a petition. It asked for the removal of a woman seen as a snitch and general troublemaker. “We are asking that Grace in trailer S12 be evicted from the trailer park before matters get worse…” the petition read. “We feel the only way to resolve this problem is to remove her before someone resolves it, and we don’t need for it to come to that.” Forty people signed what came to be known as the Petition Against Grace.

Throughout the twentieth century, as America modernized and its police force grew, citizens were instructed to clear the scene, to line up behind the yellow tape. The right to pursue and punish wrongdoers would come to rest with the state alone. But in the 1960s antiwar protesters began bleeding from standard-issue batons, citizens were speaking out against police brutality in minority communities, stories of entrenched corruption were being broadcast, Watts was burning, and violent crime was increasing. Facing this gust of changes, Americans began growing disenchanted with the criminal justice system. The coup de grâce was delivered in 1974 when Robert Martinson reviewed 231 relevant studies and concluded in the pages of The Public Interest that “with few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.” “Nothing works,” politicians and criminologists sighed. Its authority compromised, the justice system responded schizophrenically, at once giving the police more power and resources while also bringing non-police actors into the business of crime control. On the rise and character of third-party policing, see Matthew Desmond and Nicol Valdez, “Unpolicing the Urban Poor: Consequences of Third Party Policing on Inner-City Women,” American Sociological Review 78 (2013): 117–41; David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Pr...

This might lead one to wonder if recent declines in domestic violence should be credited to the increasing criminalization of family abuse or to the proliferation of nuisance property ordinances that discourage reporting.

Other landlords responded to nuisance property citations by discouraging tenants from calling 911. Some instructed tenants to call them instead of the police. A landlord running a living facility housing “persons with disabilities” posted the following sign around the building: STOP BEFORE CALLING 911 / YOU CAN BE FINED BY THE / POLICE FOR / NON-EMERGENCY CALLS / CALL [414-###-####] / ASK FOR DAWN. Other landlords threatened tenants with eviction or fines if they called 911 again. After receiving a citation, one landlord circulated the following letter to his tenants: “Tenants who place nuisance calls to the Milwaukee Police Department, or abuse the 911 system, will be fined…$50.00 PER OCCURRENCE.”

Milwaukee amended its ordinance in 2011, shortly after I shared my findings with the Police Department, city attorneys, and housing lawyers. Now, citations explicitly state that “nuisance activity” does not include domestic abuse, sexual assault, or stalking. With this step, Milwaukee has joined a handful of other municipalities—Chicago; Madison, Wisconsin; Phillipsburg, New Jersey; and the Village of East Rochester, New York, among them—whose nuisance property ordinance forbids administering citations for repeated calls due to domestic violence. They are the exception to the rule. Will dropping domestic violence from the list of nuisance activities be enough to protect battered women from the ordinance? It will most likely not, for two reasons.

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...

Mothers’ cries were heard over a century ago, when flames ravaged tenements, the fireproofing of which was deemed too costly; and they went up throughout the twentieth century, when ghetto housing in city after city ignited in flame or collapsed in decay. In Chicago alone, between 1947 and 1953 fires claimed the lives of over 180 slum dwellers, 63 of whom were under the age of ten. Conditions that invited fires—overcrowding, slipshod construction—also could prevent families from escaping. Throughout the 1960s and early ’70s, some landlords torched their own buildings to collect insurance money. Sometimes these buildings were vacant; sometimes they were not. Today, children living in substandard housing are more than ten times more likely to die in a fire than those living in decent and safe homes. Said Jacob Riis, a fire at night is “a horror that has few parallels in human experience.”

Humans act brutally under brutal conditions. “People who have never experienced chronic hunger are apt to underestimate its effects,” the psychologist A. H. Maslow once wrote. “If they”—the well-fed, the housed—“are dominated by a higher need, this higher need will seem to be the most important of all.” So it is with so many thinkers and pundits who try to explain violence in poor communities without considering the limitations of human capacity in the teeth of scarcity and suffering. Look how neighbors, perfectly peaceful when the crop yield is plenty, will claw and trample and bite one another when bread is tossed from a food truck during a famine. Or as Maslow would put it: “It is quite true that man lives by bread alone—when there is no bread.” Ideas about aggression in low-income communities that do not account for the hard squeeze of poverty, the sheer emotional and cognitive burden that accompanies severe deprivation, do not come close to capturing the lived experience of people like Arleen and Crystal.

Some middle-class people can’t help feeling incredulous, even furious, upon walking into a low-income household and spotting a big-screen television or fresh Nikes by the door. Conservative think tanks and news outlets publish reports with titles such as “Are You Poor If You Have a Flat-Screen TV?” and Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What Is Poverty in America? Liberals try to change the subject to avoid talking about behavior they wish would go away. That fancy television in the ratty apartment? Those new shoes worn by the kid eating free school lunch? Their owners likely didn’t pay full dollar for them. You can take a nice television off a hype for fifty bucks and find marked-down Nikes at the corner store. The price tags in inner-city clothing stores are for white suburban kids who don’t know how to haggle. Next to that big-screen television too it is harder to see what is missing. You are almost as likely to find as many televisions in a poor household as in a rich one. But most poor Americans do not own a computer. When Larraine ate her special meal, she didn’t even have a phone. See Tami Luhby, “Are You Poor If You Have a Flat-Screen TV?,” CNN Money, August 13, 2012; Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What Is Poverty in America? (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2011); US Energy Information Administration, Residential Energy Consumption Survey, 2012.

It is an old liberal tradition: ignoring the nastier, more embarrassing aspects of poverty. And because, to paraphrase Carol Stack (All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community [New York: Basic Books, 1974], 24), liberal commentators and researchers do not take a hard look at these aspects of poverty, they can only apologize for them. But as William Julius Wilson argued in The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]), 6, 12, “to avoid describing any behavior that might be construed as unflattering or stigmatizing” to poor people is to “render liberal arguments ineffective” because the American public wants answers to questions about that behavior. There are two ways to dehumanize: the first is to strip people of all virtue; the second is to cleanse them of all sin.

Ned might have been homeless and on the run, but he was still compensated, as W. E. B. DuBois would have it, by a “psychological wage” that involved disparaging black people. See Black Reconstruction in America (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1969 [1935]), 700.

The weight of the shame, sociologists have long thought, explained why many relationships fell apart in poor black neighborhoods. Especially for jobless men, the indignity of facing your family empty-handed built up to the point where abandonment became the lesser disgrace. To stay in a committed relationship was “to live with your failure, to be confronted by it day in and day out….In self-defense, the husband retreated to the streetcorner.” Most single mothers had no street-corner reprieve. Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 135–36. See also Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson, Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

In the days of slavery and sharecropping, black mothers and fathers often disciplined their children harshly “to prepare them for life in a white-dominated world where all blacks had to act cautiously.” Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrows: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 96. Later, during Jim Crow, black parents sometimes trained their children to be subservient and docile. “In low-class [black] families,” wrote one observer, “a child is taught that he is a ‘nigger’ and that he must be subservient to white people, since he must work for them.” A saying emerged among black families at the time: “It’s a white man’s world and you just happen to be here, nigger.” See Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 98. Today, poor mothers are less supportive, less emotionally invested, and less solicitous of their children’s needs, desires, and dreams. They give fewer hugs and tender fewer compliments. Mothers experiencing severe levels of economic deprivation hit and scold their children more frequently. The sociologist Orlando Patterson has gone so far as to say that “the parenting of boys and girls by the Afro-American lower classes has become increasingly abusive.” The standard explanation for these troubling patterns goes like this: poverty diminishes a person’s capacity for affirming and...

Most of what we know about people’s acceptance or rejection of racial integration comes from vignette studies that take place in a lab. These studies consistently find blacks to be strong proponents of integration and whites to be advocates of segregation. One paper found that most black participants reported their ideal neighborhood to be half black and half white, while most white participants said they would move from such a neighborhood. If you step out of the lab and watch families search for housing in real time, you see something different and more unsettling. White movers have strong aversions to living in black neighborhoods—but so do black movers. I never once heard a black renter voice a desire to move into an “integrated neighborhood,” although they would be contributing to racial integration simply by moving from a majority-black neighborhood. Instead, I heard them speak of a desire to “get away from these black motherfuckers,” as Crystal did. When Arleen was house hunting outside the inner city, she once said, “The only people I have a problem with is people my own color.” Natasha once said, “Black people don’t know how to act….If I had a choice, I would move out there [to the suburbs] too! Ain’t nobody want to stay out here, and you hear gunshots all the time.” In these sentiments you don’t find a (positive) desire for integration but a (negative) repulsion directed at majority-black communities. For vignette studies about racial preferences, see Reynolds Fa...

Another approach involves surveying a person’s resources before trying to access them. Because in poor neighborhoods the most accepted way to say no is to say, “I can’t,” people sometimes try to take that option off the table. So, for example, instead of asking, “Can I get a ride?” you ask, “You got gas in your car?” Instead of asking, “Could you make me a plate?” you ask, “You eat?” When someone knows you have gas in your tank or food in your refrigerator, it’s harder to give a good reason for turning him or her away. Through everyday interaction, the poor have picked up what political fund-raisers and development officers have spent millions of dollars to discover: that there is a delicate art to “the ask.” Knowing how to ask for help—and, in turn, when to extend or withhold aid—is an essential skill for managing poverty. Asking social workers for help comes with its own set of rules. You don’t want to ask for nothing, because you’ll receive nothing in return. But you also don’t want to come off as too needy, too hungry, too on the edge—because Child Protective Services might soon pay you a visit. I once met a woman, a thirty-three-year-old mother of two teenage girls, who drank a lot. She attributed her drinking to traumatic events that happened to her as a child. “I remember. Down to the smell.” “Have you ever seen a counselor?” I asked.

“No. I thought about it. But they get too deep into your business. I had somebody make a false allegation against me with child services in California. They didn’t find nothing, but it was traumatizing just the same, having somebody come through my door…and talk to my kids by theyself.” If she told someone how damaged she was, and how she coped, would she be allowed to keep her children? This mother didn’t know and wasn’t going to find out.