Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

If she fell ninety days behind, Eagle would get rid of her pile to make room for a new one. This was the fate of roughly 70 percent of lots confiscated in evictions or foreclosures.

“Yeah, but all’s I got is a microwave up there,” Kamala answered softly. Like many inner-city landlords, Sherrena and Quentin tried to limit the number of appliances in their units. If you didn’t include a stove or refrigerator, you didn’t have to fix it when it broke.

Sherrena and Quentin always planned their vacations so that they were back before the first of the month, when their days went long with eviction notices to pass out, new moves to manage, and rents to collect. Because most of their tenants didn’t have bank accounts, collecting rent was a face-to-face affair.

Doreen was looking for another place. Sherrena got off the phone and headed for the courthouse. If Doreen was withholding rent so the family could move, Sherrena would call her bluff. Sherrena paid the fee and scheduled a court date, giving Doreen an open eviction on CCAP. Now moving would be much harder. If the Hinkstons were going to go, Sherrena decided, they would go on her terms.

“See. See! He got money for a new computer but not for the rent. That’s okay. ’Cause I got ’em. The rent’s going up.” Sherrena paused for effect. “Inflation!”1

He tucked his chains into his shirt, removed his pinky ring, and slid a sweatband over his thick bracelet. He had learned that “some people think you’re out to take their rent money to buy, you know, fancy things.”

FMRs were calculated at the municipal level, which often included near and outlying suburbs. This meant that both distressed and exclusive neighborhoods were thrown into the equation.

Voucher holders more or less stayed put, upgrading to slightly nicer trailer parks or moving to quieter ghetto streets. It could, however, bring about large gains for landlords.3

she was planning on charging Ladona $775 a month, $100 more than the average rent for similar units but still well below the FMR limit. Ladona didn’t mind. With a voucher, what she paid was a function of her income, not Sherrena’s rent.5 Her rental expense wasn’t affected; the taxpayers’ bill was.

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.6

Landlords and Realtors saw government-built and -managed buildings offered at cut-rate rents as a direct threat to their legitimacy and bottom line.

But real estate interests kept lobbying for vouchers and were joined by numerous other groups of various political persuasions, including civil rights activists who thought vouchers would advance racial integration.9 Eventually, after America’s public housing experiment was defunded and declared a failure (in that order), they would have their day. As housing projects were demolished, the voucher program grew into the nation’s largest housing subsidy program for low-income families.

Since the foreclosure crisis, Sherrena had been buying properties throughout the North Side at a rate of about one a month.10 In some cities, as many as 1 in 2 foreclosures was renter-occupied.

“it’s going to create a lot of millionaires. You know, if you have money right now, you can profit from other people’s failures….I’m catching the properties. I’m catching ’em.”

You don’t buy properties for their appreciative value. You’re not in it for the future but for now.”

Sherrena estimated her net worth at around $2 million, but equity was icing on the cake. The real money was made in rents. Every month Sherrena collected roughly $20,000 in rent. Her monthly mortgage bills rounded out to $8,500.

figured she netted roughly $10,000 a month, more than what Arleen, Lamar, and many of her other tenants took home in a year. As Sherrena liked to put it: “The ’hood is good. There’s a lot of money there.”

She was trying to sell a rent-to-own tenant one property for $90,000, a property she owned free and clear, having purchased it at a far lower price. Sherrena would reinvest the cash in more properties, and the new homeowner would inherit a massive debt. Sherrena would say that was better than not owning a house at all.

In years past, Sherrena had marketed her credit-repair-to-home-loan services to physically and mentally disabled people on SSI. “A whole bunch of those people came and bought houses. They ended up losing them, but the thing is they need to be policed a little bit more….Wasn’t nobody saying, ‘Johnny, pay your mortgage!’ They just may not have been mentally capable.”

They say the foreclosure crisis started on Wall Street, with men in power ties trading toxic assets and engineering credit default swaps. But in the ghetto, all you needed was a rapid rescore coach and a low-income tenant hungry for a shot at the American Dream.

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.

Tobin took home roughly $447,000 each year, half of what the alderman had reported.3 Still, Tobin belonged to the top 1 percent of income earners. Most of his tenants belonged to the bottom 10 percent.

In his old life, before the fall, he might have been more sympathetic. But he had come to view sympathy as a kind of naïveté, a sentiment voiced from a certain distance by the callow middle classes. “They can be compassionate because it’s not their only option,” he said of liberals who didn’t live in trailer parks.

Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They “helped get rid of the riffraff,” some said. 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.

If tenants resisted excessive rent hikes or unwarranted evictions, it was because they invested in their homes and neighborhoods. They felt they belonged there. In the trailer park, that sentiment was almost dead.

Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma—believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addiction, and other harrowing events—were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives.9

In Milwaukee, the threshold was three or more calls within a thirty-day period. The ordinances pushed property owners to “abate the nuisance” or face fines, license revocation, property forfeiture, or even incarceration.

In 2008 and 2009, the Milwaukee PD issued a nuisance property citation to residential property owners every thirty-three hours.6

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.

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.

The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative.

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

He found a handicapped parking spot near the main entrance of Potawatomi Casino and hung from his rearview mirror the necessary permit, a gift from a handicapped tenant.

these people are comically evil. Absolute selfish pieces of shit

“Firefighters did not hear smoke detectors when they arrived,” he read. “There is a smoke detector in the kitchen,” he said. “There’s supposed to be one in each sleeping area,” Sherrena replied. “I thought we had put some smoke detectors up there. I can’t remember right now.”

Nobody had heard a smoke detector go off. The fire inspector told Sherrena she “didn’t have anything to worry about.” She wasn’t liable for anything that had happened. Sherrena then asked if she was obligated to return Kamala’s and Lamar’s rent, since the fire happened a few days after the first of the month. The fire inspector said no, and that settled it in Sherrena’s mind.

Larraine was talking about SSI’s “resource limit.” She was allowed to have up to $2,000 in the bank, not $1,000 like she thought, but anything more than that could result in her losing benefits.

To Sammy, Pastor Daryl, and others, Larraine was poor because she threw money away. But the reverse was more true. Larraine threw money away because she was poor.

Eight years later, Congress finally outlawed housing discrimination against children and families, but as Pam found out, the practice remained widespread.7 Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.8

Over three centuries of systematic dispossession from the land created a semipermanent black rental class and an artificially high demand for inner-city apartments.21

In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landlord simply replied, “That’s why I bought the building.”22

But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans.

At the domestic-violence shelter alone, Jori had racked up seventeen consecutive absences. Arleen saw school as a higher-order need, something to worry about after she found a house.

Some people were talking about going to Ponderosa Steakhouse after the funeral. Those who couldn’t afford it donated plasma so they could have a place at the table.

They weren’t much help if you needed a place to stay or money to keep the heat on, but they knew how to throw a funeral.

It is only after we begin to see a street as our street, a public park as our park, a school as our school, that we can become engaged citizens, dedicating our time and resources for worthwhile causes: joining the Neighborhood Watch, volunteering to beautify a playground, or running for school board.

Working on behalf of the common good is the engine of democracy, vital to our communities, cities, states—and, ultimately, the nation.

America is supposed to be a place where you can better yourself, your family, and your community. But this is only possible if you have a stable home.

When people have a place to live, they become better parents, workers, and citizens.

Every year in this country, people are evicted from their homes not by the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands but by the millions.6