Evicted (36 page)

1.
In previous academic publications, I represented the trailer park under a pseudonym. I have used its real name here.

2.
Patrick Jones,
The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1, 158, 176–77, 185; “Upside Down in Milwaukee,”
New York Times
, September 13, 1967.

3.
On the history of Hispanics in Milwaukee, see John Gurda,
The Making of Milwaukee
, 3rd ed. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2008 [1999]), 260. On segregation, see John Logan and Brian Stults,
The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis: New Findings from the 2010 Census
(Washington, DC: US Census, 2011); Harrison Jacobs, Andy Kiersz, and Gus Lubin, “The 25 Most Segregated Cities in America,”
Business Insider
, November 22, 2013.

4.
This figure is based on the trailer park's rent rolls from April to July 2008. (Lenny Lawson allowed me to copy them.) Because these arrears estimates are based on summer month totals, when nonpayment and evictions are highest, they are inflated.

5.
I did not personally witness this exchange but reconstructed the details by talking with Jerry, Lenny, and other trailer park residents. The quotation is verbatim in Jerry's recollection.

6.
Later, Tobin would look for a way to evict Phyllis, who paid her rent every month. Lenny suggested giving her an eviction notice for having a dog. Tobin's lease, with its faded and crowded type pushing forward in all caps over three pages, clearly stipulated:
NO DOGS OR FARM ANIMALS ARE ALLOWED.
But many residents had pets because Tobin and Lenny told them they could. “I'm kind of looking the other way,” Tobin would say. Lenny was suggesting they deny what was said aloud and point to what they had in writing. The lease also outlawed the consumption of alcohol on trailer park grounds.

1.
Throughout American history, city politicians have attempted to place checks on landlords' power and improve tenants' lives by laying down rules—from slum clearance to building code enforcement—as if the underlying problem were not America's abundance of poverty and lack of affordable housing but disorder and inefficiency. This often brings unanticipated consequences that increase tenants' hardship. Marc Bloch,
Feudal Society
,
vol. 1,
The Growth of Ties of Dependence
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 147; Beryl Satter,
Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 135–45.

2.
One's sovereignty over the land is expressed most powerfully in the act of banishment. Perhaps the first eviction recorded in human history was Adam and Eve's. See Lewis Mumford,
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
(New York: MJF Books, 1961), 107–10. On the link between sovereignty and expulsion, see Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
(Orlando: Harcourt, 1968).

3.
The distinctly American desire to own a home is just as pronounced among the poor as it is among the middle class. Since the pioneer days, freedom and citizenship and landholding have advanced in lockstep in the American mind. To be American was to be a homeowner. As for tenancy: it was “unfavorable to freedom,” Thomas Hart told Congress in 1820. “It lays the foundation for separate orders in society, annihilates the love of country, and weakens the spirit of independence.” Cited in Lawrence Vale,
From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 96.

4.
The nationwide vacancy rate for units renting at $300–$349, for example, fell from almost 16 percent in 2004 to below 6 percent in 2011. Author's calculations based on the Current Population Survey, 2004–2013.

5.
Trailer park vacancy rates are based on Lenny's rent rolls (April to July 2008).

6.
This event happened before my fieldwork, and I did not witness it. The quotation is based on Pam's recollection.

1.
In 1997, Milwaukee's federal Fair Market Rent (FMR)—rent and utility costs that reflect the 40th percentile of the city's rental distribution—was $466 for a one-bedroom apartment. If Arleen had rented that apartment, she would have had $162 left over each month. Ten years later, when the FMR for that same apartment was $608 and her welfare check was still $628, she would have to find a way to make $20 stretch over the entire month. FMR and welfare stipend data come from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development; Wisconsin Department of Children and Families; and State of Wisconsin Equal Rights Division. On the virtual impossibility of surviving on welfare alone, see Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein,
Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997).

2.
In 2013 there were roughly 3,900 Milwaukee families in public housing and roughly 5,800 who received housing vouchers. There were roughly 105,000 renter households in the city. See Georgia Pabst, “Waiting Lists Soar for Public Housing, Rent Assistance,”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
, August 10, 2013.

3.
Adrianne Todman, “Public Housing Did Not Fail and the Role It Must Play in Interrupting Poverty,” Harvard University, Inequality and Social Policy Seminar, March 24, 2014.

4.
To make matters worse for the very poor, the shortfall of federal housing assistance has coincided with the emergence of an employment-based safety net, which directs aid to working families through programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit or public housing reserved for parents with low-wage jobs. The result is that families just above and below the poverty line receive significantly more help today than they did twenty years ago, but those far below the poverty line receive significantly less. For families living in deep poverty, both income and housing assistance have been scaled back. On spending patterns, see Janet Currie,
The Invisible Safety Net: Protecting the Nation's Poor Children and Families
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Robert Moffitt, “The Deserving Poor, the Family, and the US Welfare System,”
Demography
52 (2015): 729–49. On the gap between housing assistance and need, see Danilo Pelletiere, Michelle Canizio, Morgan Hargrave, and Sheila Crowley,
Housing Assistance for Low Income Households: States Do Not Fill the Gap
(Washington, DC: National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2008); Douglas Rice and Barbara Sar,
Decade of Neglect Has Weakened Federal Low-Income Programs: New Resources Required to Meet Growing Needs
(Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2009).

5.
I did not personally witness this event. The scene was reconstructed through interviews with Arleen and Trisha.

6.
The Milwaukee Housing Authority's general-occupancy list for merely poor families seeking assistance was closed and backlogged, but its lists for elderly low-income adults as well as those with disabilities were kept continuously open. The Housing Authority may deny even these applicants for any number of reasons, however, including if they have a criminal record, a drug problem, or a history of missing rent payments. Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee,
Admissions and Continued Occupancy Policy (ACOP)
, October 2013, Section 7.4: “Grounds for Denial.”

7.
As state services for the needy have been scaled back, social service agencies, like Belinda's, have sprung up in poor neighborhoods across the nation to fill the void. Some are nonprofits; others are business ventures. Lester Salamon, “The Rise of the Nonprofit Sector,”
Foreign Affairs
73 (1994): 111–24, 109; John McKnight,
The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits
(New York: Basic Books, 1995); Jennifer Wolch,
The Shadow State: Government and Voluntary Sector in Transition
(New York: The Foundation Center, 1990). Urban ethnographies published during the 1960s and 1970s are striking in their lack of references to social service agencies. After reading these accounts, one cannot but arrive at the conclusion that social workers were not a major force in the lives of the urban poor fifty years ago. Carol Stack's
All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community
(New York: Basic Books, 1974) mentions but a single social worker and says almost nothing about child welfare services or similar agencies. And there are no job centers or employment counselors milling around
Tally's Corner
, which Liebow published in 1967, a book (mainly) about unemployed black men. See Elliot Liebow,
Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967).

8.
When lawmakers reformed welfare, they required states to develop sanctions for TANF recipients, procedures that involved suspending all or some of their benefit if recipients were found to be noncompliant. When W-2 began in Wisconsin, nearly two-thirds of those who entered the program were sanctioned at some point during the first four years. Chi-Fang Wu, Maria Cancian, Daniel Meyer, and Geoffrey Wallace, “How Do Welfare Sanctions Work?,”
Social Work Research
30 (2006): 33–50; Matthew Fellowes and Gretchen Rowe, “Politics and the New American Welfare States,”
American Journal of Political Science
48 (2004): 362–73; Richard Fording, Joe Soss, and Sanford Schram, “Race and the Local Politics of Punishment in the New World of Welfare,”
American Journal of Sociology
116 (2011): 1610–57.

1.
For the full models and methodology, see Matthew Desmond, Carl Gershenson, and Barbara Kiviat, “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters,”
Social Service Review
89 (2015): 227–62. Tenants represented in the Milwaukee Area Renters Study were classified as having experienced long-term housing problems if they suffered any of the following issues the year prior to being interviewed: (a) a broken stove or other appliance, (b) a broken window, (c) a broken exterior door or lock, (d) mice, rats, or other pests, or (e) exposed wires or other electrical problems
for at least three days
as well as (f) no heat, (g) no running water, or (h) stopped-up plumbing
for at least 24 hours
. To estimate the effect of a forced move on housing quality, we used doubly robust regression models that employed coarsened exact matching. Vouchered tenants were included in these analyses.

2.
While involuntary displacement by definition causes residential instability, the impact of a forced move on residential instability can last beyond the relocation immediately following eviction. Housing dissatisfaction is the key mechanism linking eviction's direct (involuntary) move and its subsequent indirect (voluntary) one, as forced movers relocating under duress often accept subpar housing but then seek to move to better conditions. An analysis of the Milwaukee Area Renters Study that employed doubly robust regression on a data set processed by coarsened exact matching found that renters who experienced a forced move were 24 percentage points more likely to undertake an unforced move soon thereafter, compared to those who did not experience involuntary displacement. Additionally, 53 percent of renters who experienced a forced move followed by an unforced move attributed their latest move to a desire to move to a better housing unit or neighborhood, while only 34 percent of renters with two consecutive unforced moves did so. In other words, unforced movers whose previous move was involuntary were far more likely to cite housing or neighborhood problems as the reason for moving than were unforced movers whose previous move was also unforced. Not only do poor renters disproportionately experience involuntary displacement, but involuntary displacement itself brings about subsequent residential mobility. See Desmond et al., “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters.”

3.
Jane Jacobs,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(New York: Random House, 1961), 31–32; Robert Sampson,
Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), especially 127, 146–47, 151, 177, 231–32. For an ethnographic take on the uses of public space, see Mitchell Duneier,
Sidewalk
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

4.
Jacobs,
Death and Life of Great American Cities
, 271, emphasis mine.

5.
This strategy, if it was that, backfired when tenants didn't report housing problems that bit into Sherrena and Quentin's bottom line, like a running toilet.

6.
Landlords were required to disclose code violations before entering into a rental agreement with prospective tenants. City of Milwaukee,
Landlord Training Program: Keeping Illegal and Destructive Activity Out of Rental Property
, 7th ed. (Milwaukee: City of Milwaukee, Department of Neighborhood Services, 2006), 12; Wisconsin Administrative Code, ATCP134.04, “Disclosure Requirements.”

7.
Housing problems motivate a significant number of moves among Milwaukee renters. Consider “responsive moves,” which are neither forced displacements (e.g., eviction, building condemnation) nor completely voluntary relocations (to gain residential advantage) but something in between. Data from the Milwaukee Area Renters Study reveal that the most common type of responsive move among Milwaukee renters between 2009 and 2011 was that initiated by a housing problem. These moves accounted for 23 percent of responsive moves and 7 percent of all moves undertaken by renters in the two years prior to being surveyed. These moves were not motivated by a positive impulse (moving to a bigger apartment) but by a negative one (the need to leave units after housing conditions deteriorated). See Desmond et al., “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters.”

8.
As thousands of underwater homeowners learned when the housing bubble popped, defaulting can be far more rational than throwing money into a black hole. Timothy Riddiough and Steve Wyatt, “Strategic Default, Workout, and Commercial Mortgage Valuation,”
Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics
9 (1994): 5–22; Lindsay Owens, “Intrinsically Advantaged? Middle-Class (Dis)advantage in the Case of Home Mortgage Modification,”
Social Forces
93 (2015): 1185–209.

9.
Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. Between 2009 and 2011, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $550; for a three-bedroom it was $775.

The professionalization of the rental market, combined with the spread of information technology, may have contributed to compressing rents within cities through either competition or price coordination. Large-scale property managers often rely on products with names like Rainmaker LRO, RentPush, and RENTmaximizer—complex algorithms that draw on hundreds of current and historical market indicators to adjust lease prices daily, even hourly. The RENTmaximizer, used in over 8 million residential units worldwide, offers property owners “higher revenue by quicker adjustments to market conditions” (
www.yardi.com
). For do-it-yourself types, how-to real estate books advised landlords to conduct monthly market surveys. “You call nearby complexes and check out what their rental rates are to make sure you are not too high and not too low,” writes Bryan Chavis in
Buy It, Rent It, Profit! Make Money as a Landlord in Any Real Estate Market
(New York: Touchstone, 2009), 51. Picking up the phone was an extra measure, since several websites stood ready to report whether an apartment was above or below rent in the surrounding area (
www
.
rentometer.com
).

10.
Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011; merged with neighborhood-level data from the American Community Survey (2006–2010) and Milwaukee Police Department crime records (2009–2011). Consider one other statistic: the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $575 in Milwaukee's most dangerous neighborhoods (those at or above the 75th percentile in violent crime rate) and $600 in its least dangerous (those at or below the 25th percentile in violent crime rate).

11.
Jacob Riis,
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
(New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 11; Allan Spear,
Black Chicago:
The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 24–26; Joe William Trotter Jr.,
Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45,
2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 179; Thomas Sugrue,
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 54; Marcus Anthony Hunter,
Black
Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 80.

12.
According to the Community Advocates rent abatement guidelines at the time of this fieldwork, a tenant could withhold 5 percent for no door or if the apartment was infested with roaches; 10 percent for a broken toilet; and 25 percent for no heat.

13.
Landlords with vacant units could lower their rent, but some would prefer the vacancy. Sherrena once showed a prospective tenant, a truck driver, a ground-floor unit in a four-family complex. It had sat empty for two months. The man looked at the patches of carpet a dog had mangled, fingered the unhinged cupboards, squeaked his shoe on the grimy kitchen floor. “This just isn't the kind of living I'm used to,” he said. “How about $380?”

“No way,” Sherrena responded, offended.

Collecting $380 would have been better than collecting nothing for that particular unit—but not if it meant that rent for everyone else in the building would drop. The three other units in the complex were occupied with tenants paying $600 a month. If Sherrena took the truck driver's deal, the other tenants would learn about it and likely demand a similar rate. If she allowed it, her take-home would be less than it was renting three units at $600. If she refused, some tenants might leave, causing more vacancies. Sherrena showed the truck driver out and locked the door behind him.

14.
Forty-four percent, to be exact. Serious and lasting housing problems are defined above (chapter 6, note 1). Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.

15.
Comparing two-bedroom units in the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. In the 1970s and 1980s, rents increased primarily because housing quality did; see Christopher Jencks,
The Homeless
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 84–89. But since then, housing quality across America had remained virtually unchanged—if anything, the 2000s saw small declines in quality nationwide—while rents shot up. According to the American Housing Survey, there were approximately 909,000 renter-occupied units with severe physical problems in 1993. That number increased to 1.2 million by 2011. The proportion of all rental households with severe physical problems has remained flat over the last two decades (at roughly 3 percent). The same is true for other measures of housing quality. For example, in 1993, 9 percent of renters reported being “uncomfortably cold for 24 hours or more” because the heating broke. In 2011, 10 percent did. During the 2000s, rental housing across America did not undergo drastic improvements that kept pace with rent increases.

16.
When those properties stopped cashing out, because they amassed too many fines or required costly repairs, Sherrena would “let 'em go back to the city.” This meant she would simply stop paying taxes on those properties until the city eventually took control of them through tax foreclosures. Sherrena shielded herself from any personal liability by registering each of her properties under a different Limited Liability Company (LLC). In the eyes of the law, it was the company, not Sherrena, that defaulted. Milwaukee saw between 1,100 and 1,200 properties go into tax foreclosure every year. When the city inherited these used-up and discarded houses, it sold or demolished them, further shrinking the affordable housing stock. For Sherrena, losing property this way was not a mistake or the result of a financial setback. It was a basic part of her business model. “When I get tired of a property,” she said, “I just let it go. Why would you keep throwing good money at the bad?”

Sherrena created LLCs online, through the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions (DFI). The DFI records a registered agent for each LLC but not owner names or Wisconsin tax information (
www.wdfi.org
). The estimates for the number of tax foreclosures in Milwaukee come from Kevin Sullivan, Assistant City Attorney (personal communication, August 13, 2015).

Policymakers and researchers focused on poor people's housing, most of whom have never set foot in an apartment like Doreen's, often point out that America has made impressive strides toward improving housing quality for its poor. “The affordability of housing is today of far greater concern than physical condition or crowding,” Alex Schwartz writes, echoing the prevailing view (Alex Schwartz,
Housing Policy in the United States
, 2nd ed. [New York: Routledge, 2010], 26). This view is not wrong, but it gives the impression that the two problems are independent of each other; that since cities have razed tenements and criminalized lead paint, it is now time to confront the lack of affordable housing. But the two problems—poor housing conditions and high costs—are interlocked. At the bottom of the housing market, each permits the other.

17.
Kenneth Clark,
Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 72; Carol Stack,
All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community
(New York: Basic Books, 1974), 46–47; Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson,
Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), chapter 2.

18.
The sociologist Linda Burton refers to the process of young people being prematurely exposed to the world of adults as “childhood adultification.” See Linda Burton, “Childhood Adultification in Economically Disadvantaged Families: A Conceptual Model,”
Family Relations
56 (2007): 329–45.

19.
I didn't witness this, but I did see the broken table and discussed the matter with Doreen, Patrice, Natasha, and Patrice's children. This is how Patrice's ten-year-old son, Mikey, interpreted that event: “You know, some people just be stressed. Everybody gets stressed, gets mad sometimes. And they was stressed and just had to let it out.” He said it made him feel “embarrassed because of how it makes our family look, as a unit.”