Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

Families who couldn’t both make rent and keep current with the utility company sometimes paid a cousin or neighbor to reroute the meter. As much as $6 billion worth of power was pirated across America every year. Only cars and credit cards got stolen more.

“The police ain’t protecting us,” Buck said. “I feel you on that. But all polices are not the same….If I was in the neighborhood, and it was rough, I’d want the police to clean that shit up too.”

Milwaukee used to be flush with good jobs. But throughout the second half of the twentieth century, bosses in search of cheap labor moved plants overseas or to Sunbelt communities, where unions were weaker or didn’t exist.

The high demand for the cheapest housing told landlords that for every family in a unit there were scores behind them ready to take their place. In such an environment, the incentive to lower the rent, forgive a late payment, or spruce up your property was extremely low.

“Figures,” Ned had mumbled past a dangling cigarette when he found out Pam was pregnant with another daughter. He had made a son once, when he was sixteen, with a Mexican girl he’d met at a ZZ Top concert. But the girl’s family blotted him out, and Ned hardly thought about that boy anymore unless “La Grange” came on the radio.

“The public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.” So wrote Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

A single eviction could destabilize multiple city blocks, not only the block from which a family was evicted but also the block to which it begrudgingly relocated. In this way, displacement contributed directly to what Jacobs called “perpetual slums,” churning environments with high rates of turnover and even higher rates of resentment and disinvestment. “The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out.”

Tenants able to pay their rent in full each month could take advantage of legal protections designed to keep their housing safe and decent. Not only could they summon a building inspector without fear of eviction, but they also had the right to withhold rent until certain repairs were made.12 But when tenants fell behind, these protections dissolved. Tenants in arrears were barred from withholding or escrowing rent; and they tempted eviction if they filed a report with a building inspector. It was not that low-income renters didn’t know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them.

Shortly after Doreen told Sherrena she would be withholding her rent, Natasha discovered she was four months pregnant. When she told her momma, Doreen laughed and said, “I told you so!” She had noticed the changes Natasha had tried to ignore. Doreen was thrilled. “I’m about to be a proud grandmother again,” she crowed. Natasha’s boyfriend was thrilled. A new pregnancy, legitimate or otherwise, was something to celebrate—unless you were a young woman trying to live free and independent.

Can we bring back being ashamed of unwed pregnancy?

“I don’t see how in the world I got pregnant,” Natasha whined. “I don’t even like pregnant stomachs.”

? ? ?

When tenants threatened him, he tried to let it slide. But every so often, something would happen, and Quentin would put on his black hoodie and black jeans, and Sherrena would shoot him a dirty look at the door but stay quiet because she had learned she couldn’t say anything when it got to that point, and Quentin would climb in the Suburban and call his guys and go deal with something.

a housing voucher, Ladona would pay a small portion of the rent—30 percent of her income—and taxpayers would pick up the rest. Sherrena’s rent would be

Makes sense to me. How about a sequel to "Eviction" where we follow the daily trials of police officers / social workers / paramedics / school teachers?