Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

As much as $6 billion worth of power was pirated across America every year. Only cars and credit cards got stolen more.

Neighborhoods marred by high poverty and crime were that way not only because poverty could incite crime, and crime could invite poverty, but also because the techniques landlords used to “keep illegal and destructive activity out of rental property” kept poverty out as well. This also meant that violence, drug activity, deep poverty, and other social problems coalesced at a much smaller, more acute level than the neighborhood. They gathered at the same address.

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.10

Patrice never felt her existence questioned. She tried not to go to parts of the city where she did. Patrice lived four miles away from the shore of Lake Michigan: an hour on foot, a half hour by bus, fifteen minutes by car. She had never been.

they used to take a break from doing evictions around Christmastime in Milwaukee. But they did away with that in 1991, after a landlord convinced the American Civil Liberties Union to argue that the practice was an unfair religious celebration.11

Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11 percent reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31 percent of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent.7

It was easy to go on about helping “the poor.” Helping a poor person with a name, a face, a history, and many needs, a person whose mistakes and lapses of judgment you have recorded—that was a more trying matter.

How a tenant responded to an eviction notice could make the difference. Women tended not to negotiate their eviction like men did, and they were more likely to avoid landlords when they fell behind. These responses did not serve them well.

Jerry’s confrontational response aligned with Tobin’s blunt and brusque way. Property management was a profession dominated by men and by a gruff, masculine way of doing business. That put men like Jerry at an advantage.

Men often avoided eviction by laying concrete, patching roofs, or painting rooms for landlords. But women almost never approached their landlord with a similar offer. Some women—already taxed by child care, welfare requirements, or work obligations—could not spare the time. But many others simply did not conceive of working off the rent as a possibility. When women did approach their landlords with such an offer, it sometimes involved trading sex for rent.

Reported high rates of joblessness among black men with little education obscured the fact that many of these men did regularly work, if not in the formal labor market.

In Milwaukee, renters with housing vouchers were charged an average of $55 more each month, compared to unassisted renters who lived in similar apartments in similar neighborhoods. Overcharging voucher holders cost taxpayers an additional $3.6 million each year in Milwaukee alone—the equivalent of supplying 588 more needy families with housing assistance.

But large-scale social transformations—the crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them—had frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit “kin dependence” by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.

Being high was a “mini vacation” from his shame of a life. He took the trip whenever he could afford it.

No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.2

Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them—which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.

In the trailer park, that sentiment was almost dead. For most residents, Scott among them, the goal was to leave, not to plant roots and change things.

All over the city, people who lived in distressed neighborhoods were more likely to help their neighbors pay bills, buy groceries, fix their car, or lend a hand in other ways, compared to their peers in better-off areas.6

When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice, full of “all sorts of shipwrecked humanity,” they lost confidence in its political capacity.

There was always something worse than the trailer park, always room to drop lower.

In white neighborhoods, only 1 in 41 properties that could have received a nuisance citation actually did receive one. In black neighborhoods, 1 in 16 eligible properties received a citation. A woman reporting domestic violence was far more likely to land her landlord a nuisance citation if she lived in the inner city.7 In the vast majority of cases (83 percent), landlords who received a nuisance citation for domestic violence responded by either evicting the tenants or by threatening to evict them for future police calls. Sometimes, this meant evicting a couple, but most of the time landlords evicted women abused by men who did not live with them.8

What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department’s own rules presented battered women with a devil’s bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction.11

People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They might buy lobster on food stamps.6

In 1930, the death rate for Milwaukee’s blacks was nearly 60 percent higher than the citywide rate, due in large part to poor housing conditions.

If you didn’t have the money, you would pay with your time.

During that time, Scott often thought about killing himself. He’d have done it with a monster hit of heroin; but he never could find enough money.

They did not go to court but undeniably were evicted. (Their names appear in the eviction records.) Nevertheless, they didn’t see things this way. “When you say ‘eviction,’ ” Rose explained, “I think of the sheriffs coming and throwing you out and changing your locks, and Eagle Movers tosses your stuff on the curb. That’s an eviction. We were not evicted.” If Rose and Tim had been asked during a survey, “Have you ever been evicted?,” they would have answered no. Accordingly, surveys that have posed this question vastly underestimate the prevalence of involuntary removal from housing.