Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, even though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today.

Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on.

In Milwaukee, a city of fewer than 105,000 renter households, landlords evict roughly 16,000 adults and children each year.

Nearly half of all forced moves experienced by renting families in Milwaukee are “informal evictions” that take place in the shadow of the law. If you count all forms of involuntary displacement—formal and informal evictions, landlord foreclosures, building condemnations—you discover that between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move.4

We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.

Many tenants who in the winter stayed current on their rent at the expense of their heating bill tried in the summer to climb back in the black with the utility company by shorting their landlord. Come the following winter, they had to be connected to benefit from the moratorium on disconnection. So every year in Milwaukee evictions spiked in the summer and early fall and dipped again in November, when the moratorium began.

I love to get money, but I’m still just as happy not running around and dealing with some of these dregs of society who live in rooming houses.”10 Sherrena, who owned a couple of rooming houses, laughed along with the room.

All this makes me hate landlords more

“There is money to be made on lead,” to a room of landlords who more often lost money trying to abate it. One landlord asked whether he would have to report the presence of asbestos to the city or the tenants if he tested for it. “No, you don’t,” the woman had said.

Many white landlords knew money could be made in the inner city, where property was cheap, but the thought of collecting payments on the North Side, let alone passing out eviction notices, made them nervous. Sherrena wanted them to know that she could help. For the right price, she would manage their property or consult with them about where to buy in the ghetto; she would be their broker to black Milwaukee.

This woman was a teacher before this.

“Thirty dollars.” Sherrena shrugged. “But that’s not it. It’s the principle….He already owes me two sixty for that bad job for the painting.” When Lamar and the boys had finished painting, he called Sherrena, and she came over. She noticed that the boys had not filled in the holes; had dripped white paint on the brown trim; had ignored the pantry. Lamar said Quentin had not dropped off hole-filler or brown paint. “You’re supposed to go and ask for it, then,” Sherrena snapped back. She refused to credit Lamar a cent toward his debt.

Jfc

Open housing law or not, Milwaukee would remain one of the most racially divided cities in the nation.

When city or state officials pressured landlords—by ordering them to hire an outside security firm or by having a building inspector scrutinize their property—landlords often passed the pressure on to their tenants.1 There was also the matter of reestablishing control. The most effective way to assert, or reassert, ownership of land was to force people from it.2

“They,” in this case, meant Pam and her family. After driving Pam to eviction court, Tobin had asked her to talk to the newspeople. She was thirty years old and seven months pregnant, with a midwestern twang and a face cut from a high school yearbook photo. She made for a sympathetic case. But now Tobin was cleaning house.

Pam tried changing Tobin’s mind by signing over the $1,200 check she had just received as part of Obama’s economic stimulus act. She thought it would be enough, mainly because she thought she owed $1,800. But Tobin said she owed something more like $3,000, and Office Susie told him Pam smoked crack. Tobin accepted Pam’s stimulus check but moved forward with the eviction anyway. Pam’s family had lived in the trailer park for two years.

But unlike the renters, families who owned their trailers were responsible for upkeep. In theory, a family could at any time move their trailer elsewhere. But the owners knew that in practice this was impossible. Towing expenses exceed $1,500 and setting up the trailer somewhere else could cost double that. When owners were evicted and inevitably left their trailer behind, Tobin would reclaim it as “abandoned property” and give it to someone else.

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.

Tobin huffed when Office Susie told him that Pam and Ned were staying with Scott and Teddy. He had agreed to rent Scott and Teddy’s trailer to Scott and Teddy, nobody else. Tobin gave Scott and Teddy an eviction notice, tacking on Pam and Ned’s rental debt to Scott and Teddy’s bill. Eviction could be contagious that way.

Landlords are evil af

She received the same stipend in 2008 that she would have when welfare was reformed over a decade earlier: $20.65 a day, $7,536 a year. Since 1997, welfare stipends in Milwaukee and almost everywhere else have not budged, even as housing costs have soared.

Most poor people in America were like Arleen: they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.

If Arleen wanted public housing, she would have to save a month’s worth of income to repay the Housing Authority for leaving her subsidized apartment without giving notice; then wait two to three years until the List unfroze; then wait another two to five years until her application made it to the top of the pile; then pray to Jesus that the person with the stale coffee and heavy stamp reviewing her file would somehow overlook the eviction record she’d collected while trying to make ends meet in the private housing market on a welfare check.

the presence of people who simply were present, who looked after the neighborhood. She has been proved right: disadvantaged neighborhoods with higher levels of “collective efficacy”—the stuff of loosely linked neighbors who trust one another and share expectations about how to make their community better—have lower crime rates.

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.

’30s, rent for dilapidated housing in the black ghettos of Milwaukee and Philadelphia and other northern cities exceeded that for better housing in white neighborhoods. As late as 1960, rent in major cities was higher for blacks than for whites in similar accommodations.11 The poor did not crowd into slums because of cheap housing. They were there—and this was especially true of the black poor—simply because they were allowed to be.

For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetually behind; and many poor tenants would be perpetually behind because their rent was too high.

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.

“In your own heart, you convince yourself that you need it more than they do,” Scott remembered. “ ‘If I do this, I’ll be able to take care of thirty of you.’ ”

Funded by the Department of Justice, the Landlord Training Program began in the 1990s with the goal of “keeping illegal and destructive activity out of rental property.”5

People who make an honest living care about their home and often show it in the way they look at the unit. Some who rent for illegal operations forget to pretend they have the same interest.”

Landlords were major players in distributing the spoils. They decided who got to live where. And their screening practices (or lack thereof) revealed why crime and gang activity or an area’s civic engagement and its spirit of neighborliness could vary drastically from one block to the next. They also helped explain why on the same block in the same low-income neighborhood, one apartment complex but not another became familiar to the police.10

Screening practices that banned criminality and poverty in the same stroke drew poor families shoulder to shoulder with drug dealers, sex offenders, and other lawbreakers in places with lenient requirements.

she had filed the paperwork and received a court date of December 23, which would be the last eviction court before Christmas that year. Sherrena knew the courthouse would be packed. Many parents chose to take their chances with their landlords rather than face their children empty-handed on Christmas morning.

what a Grinch of a woman

her rent money could be returned so she could buy gifts. Sherrena told her, “You gotta have a house to put the Christmas tree and presents in….You’ve been knowing Christmas was coming eleven months ago.”

She’d even had a worker deliver a stove that was sitting unused in one of her vacant units. But she knew that, once in front of the commissioner, Arleen was more likely to bring up the time the water heater went out or mention the hole in the window Quentin still hadn’t fixed.

Everyone in the reserved space, the lawyers and bailiff, was white.

In some urban courts, only 1 tenant in 10 showed.4 Some tenants couldn’t miss work or couldn’t find child care or were confused by the whole process or couldn’t care less or would rather avoid the humiliation.

Tenants in eviction court were generally poor, and almost all of them (92 percent) had missed rent payments. The majority spent at least half their household income on rent. One-third devoted at least 80 percent to it.

Of the tenants who did come to court and were evicted, only 1 in 6 had another place lined up: shelters or the apartments of friends or family.

As usual, the courtroom was full of black women. In a typical month, 3 in 4 people in Milwaukee eviction court were black. Of those, 3 in 4 were women. The total number of black women in eviction court exceeded that of all other groups combined.

Women from black neighborhoods made up 9 percent of Milwaukee’s population and 30 percent of its evicted tenants.

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

Arleen remembered when 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.

“It’s still not fair! Nobody ever does anything to these tenants. It’s always the landlord. This system is flawed….But whatever. I’ll never see the money. These people are deadbeats.”

To landlords, docketing a judgment was a long-odds bet on a tenant’s future. Who knows, maybe somewhere down the line a tenant would want to get her credit in order and would approach her old landlord, asking to repay the debt. “Debt with interest,” the landlord could respond, since money judgments accrued interest at an annual rate that would be the envy of any financial portfolio: 12 percent. For the chronically and desperately poor whose credit was already wrecked, a docketed judgment was just another shove deeper into the pit. But for the tenant who went on to land a decent job or marry and then take another tentative step forward, applying for student loans or purchasing a first home—for that tenant, it was a real barrier on the already difficult road to self-reliance and security.

The self-described “largest and most aggressive landlord collection agency in the country” reported delinquent tenants to three national credit bureaus and placed them on a nationwide tracking system that allowed the company to follow tenants’ financial lives “without their knowledge.”

Rent Recovery Service “never closed an unpaid file.”15 Some of those files contained debt amounts calculated in a reasonable and well-documented way; others contained bloated second and third causes and unreasonably high interest rates. But since both had the court’s approval, Rent Recovery Service did not distinguish between them.

A dismissed eviction judgment meant a dropped money judgment as well, and obtaining money judgments, even against single mothers on welfare, was one of the primary reasons Sherrena evicted tenants through the court system.

Some claimed never to have received notice or pointed out, accurately, that the notice did not announce a date or even a range of dates when the eviction would take place.

Hispanic and African American neighborhoods had been targeted by the subprime lending industry: renters were lured into buying bad mortgages, and homeowners were encouraged to refinance under riskier terms. Then it all came crashing down. 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

Landlords showed considerable discretion over whether to move forward with an eviction, extending leniency to some and withdrawing it from others.

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.11