Evicted (37 page)

1.
Since the early 1990s, opioid prescriptions have tripled in the United States, as have overdoses. Centers for Disease Control,
Policy Impact: Prescription Pain Killer Overdoses
(Washington, DC: Centers for Disease Control, 2011); National Institutes of Health,
Analysis of Opioid Prescription Practices Finds Areas of Concern
(Washington, DC: NIH News, US Department of Health and Human Services, 2011).

2.
Stacey Mayes and Marcus Ferrone, “Transdermal System for the Management  of Acute Postoperative Pain,”
Annals of Pharmacotherapy
40 (2006): 2178–86.

3.
This quotation and other events of Scott's drug use during his time as a nurse come from the record of Scott's disciplinary proceedings in front of the Wisconsin Board of Nursing. I corroborated the details with Scott.

4.
See Wisconsin Statutes 19.31–19.39 and 59.20(3).

5.
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).

6.
RentGrow has since become Yardi Resident Screening, which offers “terrorist, drug trafficker, sex offender, and Social Security fraud screening” (
www.yardi
.com
). In the United States there are approximately 650 tenant-screening companies. Although these reports are often riddled with errors, landlords increasingly have come to rely on them. See Rudy Kleysteuber, “Tenant Screening Thirty Years Later: A Statutory Proposal to Protect Public Records,”
Yale Law Journal
116 (2006): 1344–88; Matthew Callanan, “Protecting the Unconvicted: Limiting Iowa's Rights to Public Access in Search of Greater Protection for Criminal Defendants Whose Charges Do Not End in Convictions,”
Iowa Law Review
98 (2013): 1275–308.

7.
“These tenants, a lot of them it's like pigs in a dollhouse,” Wilbur Bush told me. An older African American man with a flattop, leather jacket, and gold crucifix, Bush had been a landlord since the 1960s. Bush personally inspected applicants' current apartments, making sure to open the refrigerator. (I accompanied him on apartment screening visits and sat in his office as he interviewed tenants.) “So what you're doing here, if you can relate,” he continued, “you're trying to get the best of the worst….Because I've been in places where it's an upward climb to zero.”

8.
Some screening techniques were not mentioned that Saturday morning. One landlord, whose father was also a landlord, told me he uses the following strategy: Upon receiving an application from a woman with children, he looks first not at her income or previous residence but at the emergency contacts. “If they list a mother
and
a father, I know I won't have any trouble with the lease.” But if she lists just a mother, he then looks at the applicant's last name. If it differs from her mother's, he infers the applicant is divorced or remarried, a plus. If the surnames match, he considers the applicant a single mother by a single mother—and usually turns her down.

9.
This is a very different way of understanding how certain people get sorted into certain neighborhoods, compared to conventional perspectives—one that pays attention to the people doing the sorting:
the landlords
. For the Chicago School, the city was a space of sentiments and its pattern of physical and social segregation primarily the result of tens of thousands of individual decisions based on where one best fits. “In the long run,” wrote Robert Park, “every individual finds somewhere among the varied manifestations of city life the sort of environment in which he expands or feels at ease.” See Robert Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” in
The City
, eds. Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 41. The sentimental neighborhood, like the plant habitat on which the urban ecology perspective was based, becomes for all purposes sentient, drawing to it those who belong. R. D. McKenzie would explain residential sorting as being steered by “a selective or magnetic force [emanating from various neighborhoods] attracting to itself appropriate population elements and repelling incongruous units, thus making for biological and cultural subdivisions of a city's population.” R. D. McKenzie, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community,” in Park, Burgess, and McKenzie, eds.,
The City
, 63–79, 78.

The most influential perspective on residential mobility—the residential attainment model—is deeply influenced by the Chicago School's vision of mobility and neighborhood sorting. But those working within this tradition substitute the Chicago School's emphasis on sentimentality and morality with one focused on instrumentality and economic advancement. The residential attainment model perceives mobility as a result of social climbing and views the city not as a patchwork of isolated moral worlds but as a geography of advantage and disadvantage. According to this perspective, when people move, they try to move up, parlaying economic capital for residential capital. See John Logan and Richard Alba, “Locational Returns to Human Capital: Minority Access to Suburban Community Resources,”
Demography
30 (1993): 243–68; Scott South and Kyle Crowder, “Escaping Distressed Neighborhoods: Individual, Community, and Metropolitan Influences,”
American Journal of Sociology
102 (1997): 1040–84.

What each perspective overlooks is the crucial fact that
urban neighborhoods are markets
, largely owned, in the case of the inner city, by those who do not live within their borders. Consequentially, market actors in general—and landlords, in particular—should be seen as central players in our theories of neighborhood selection and mobility. See John Logan and Harvey Molotch,
Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 33–34.

10.
On neighborhood variation, see Robert Sampson,
Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Peter St. Jean,
Pockets of Crime: Broken Windows, Collective Efficacy, and the Criminal Point of View
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

11.
See John Caskey,
Fringe Banking: Check-Cashing Outlets, Pawnshops, and the Poor
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013); Gary Rivlin,
Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.
(New York: Harper, 2010).

1.
Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,”
American Journal of Sociology
118 (2012): 88–133.

2.
In 2013, Milwaukee County processed almost 64,000 civil cases, roughly double the number of its criminal cases. Nationwide, the incoming civil caseload in 2010 was 13.8 million, compared to 10.6 million criminal cases. Wisconsin Circuit Court,
Caseload Summary by Responsible Court Official, County Wide Report
(Madison, WI: Wisconsin Courts, 2014). Court Statistics Project,
National Civil and Criminal Caseloads
and
Civil/Criminal Court Caseloads: Total Caseloads
(Williamsburg, VA: National Center for State Courts, 2010).

3.
One Milwaukee landlord who owned roughly 100 units in low-income neighborhoods told me he gave approximately 30 percent of his tenants five-day eviction notices each month. A $50 late fee accompanied each notice. He estimated that 90 percent of those cases were settled via stipulation; the remaining 10 percent were evicted. This meant that he collected roughly $1,350 in late fees each month from tenants he did not evict. That amounted to over $16,000 a year in late fees alone.

4.
Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011. In addition to surveying tenants, interviewers took eviction court attendance every weekday (save one) between January 17 and February 26, 2011. During this six-week period, in 945 out of 1,328 cases, tenants did not appear in court, with most receiving an eviction judgment. Of those that did appear in court, slightly more than one-third signed stipulation agreements. Some would later be evicted; some would not. One-quarter had to return to court on another day, owing to paperwork errors or because their case was complicated enough to be sent to a judge. Twelve percent had their cases dismissed. The remaining 29 percent received eviction judgments.

Documented default rates in other cities and states range from 35 percent to over 90 percent. See Randy Gerchick, “No Easy Way Out: Making the Summary Eviction Process a Fairer and More Efficient Alternative to Landlord Self-Help,”
UCLA Law Review
41 (1994): 759–837; Erik Larson, “Case Characteristics and Defendant Tenant Default in a Housing Court,”
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies
3 (2006): 121–44; David Caplovitz,
Consumers in Trouble: A Study of Debtors in Default
(New York: The Free Press, 1974).

5.
With Jonathan Mijs, I combined all eviction court records between January 17 and February 26, 2011 (the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study period) with information about aspects of tenants' neighborhoods, procured after geocoding the addresses that appeared in the eviction records. Working with the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, I also calculated the distance (in drive miles and time) between tenants' addresses and the courthouse. Then I constructed a statistical model that attempted to explain the likelihood of a tenant appearing in court based on aspects of that tenant's case and her or his neighborhood. The model generated only null findings. How much a tenant owed a landlord, her commute time to the courthouse, her gender—none of these factors were significantly related to appearing in court. I also investigated whether several aspects of a tenant's neighborhood—e.g., its eviction, poverty, and crime rates—mattered when it came to explaining defaults. None did. None of the explanatory variables I tried were statistically associated with showing up to eviction court. The absence of a clear pattern in the data implies that defaults are more or less random. Other studies have arrived at similar conclusions, as have the housing specialists at Community Advocates. One told me: “As for going down to the courthouse…well, they have to eat; they've got to ride the bus; got to find someone to watch their kids. Everything is pretty much driven by the moment.” See Barbara Bezdek, “Silence in the Court: Participation and Subordination of Poor Tenants' Voices in Legal Process,”
Hofstra Law Review
20 (1992): 533–608; Larson, “Case Characteristics and Defendant Tenant Default in a Housing Court.”

6.
Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011. For more information about the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, see Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty”; Matthew Desmond et al., “Evicting Children,”
Social Forces
92 (2013): 303–27. According to the 2013 American Housing Survey (Table S-08-RO), 71 percent of poor renting families who reported receiving an eviction notice within the last three months did so because of missed rent payments.

7.
Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011. The 2013 American Housing Survey asked all renters where they would move in the event of an eviction (Table S-08-RO). Most reported, optimistically enough, that they would move to “a new home.” But when you step from the hypothetical to the actual and ask tenants who have just received an eviction judgment where they are planning to go, most haven't a clue.

8.
Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011.

9.
In Milwaukee's poorest black neighborhoods, 1 male renter in 33 was evicted through the court system each year, compared to 1 male renter in 134 and 1 female renter in 150 in the city's poorest white neighborhoods. By “poorest neighborhoods,” I mean census block groups in which at least 40 percent of families lived below the poverty line. By “white/black neighborhoods,” I mean block groups in which at least two-thirds of the residents were white/black. Because eviction records do not include sex identifiers, two methods were employed to impute sex. First, a pair of research assistants assigned a sex to each person—over 90,000 of them—based on first names. Second, with the help of Felix Elwert, I imputed gender by drawing on Social Security card applications for US births. Each method produced virtually identical point estimates. An annual household eviction rate was calculated by dividing the number of eviction cases in a year by the number of occupied rental units estimated for that year. Additionally, for each neighborhood (block group), I estimated the eviction rate for male and female renters by dividing the number of evictees of one sex by the number of adults of the same sex living in rental housing. All statistics were calculated for each block group for each year. The results were then pooled and annual averages calculated. For a fuller explanation of the methods used to arrive at these estimates, see Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty.”

In an average year between 2003 and 2007, 276 court-ordered evictions took place in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, compared to 1,187 and 2,759 in white and black neighborhoods, respectively. Like women in black neighborhoods, women in Hispanic neighborhoods were evicted at higher rates. On average, in high-poverty Hispanic neighborhoods, 1 male renter in 86 and 1 female renter in 40 were evicted through the court system every year. Estimates that considered informal evictions and landlord foreclosures were even more alarming. Between 2009 and 2011, roughly 23 percent of Hispanic renters in Milwaukee were forcibly removed from their homes sometime in the previous two years, via formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation. This extraordinarily high rate of forced mobility—almost twice that of black renters—was attributed to the fact that the foreclosure crisis hit Milwaukee's Hispanic
renters
particularly hard. When landlord foreclosures were excluded from the estimate of involuntary displacement prevalence, the percentage of renters who had experienced a forced move within two years fell from 13.2 percent to 10.2 percent. This exclusion caused the rates of involuntary mobility among white and black renters to fall from 9 to 7 percent and from 12 to 10 percent, respectively. But its biggest impact was seen in the rate of involuntary mobility among Hispanic renters, which fell from 23 percent to 14 percent after landlord foreclosures were dropped. Milwaukee County eviction court records, 2003–2007; Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.

10.
In poor black communities, women were more likely to work in the formal economy than men, many of whom were marked by a criminal record and unemployed at high rates. Many landlords did not approve the rental applications of unemployed persons or those with criminal records. In the inner city, women were more likely to provide the necessary income documentation when securing a lease, either from an employment check or public assistance like welfare. In Milwaukee, half of working-age black men were out of work and half in their thirties had done prison time—twinned trends not unrelated. WUMN,
Project Milwaukee: Black Men in Prison
, Milwaukee Public Radio, July 16, 2014; Marc Levine,
The Crisis Continues: Black Male Joblessness in Milwaukee
(Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Center for Economic Development, 2008). Audit studies have shown that Milwaukee employers are more likely to call back white job seekers with criminal records than black job seekers with clean backgrounds. Black job seekers with criminal records are doubly disadvantaged. Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,”
American Journal of Sociology
108 (2003): 937–75.

If court records usually listed only leaseholders, it could be the case that women from poor black neighborhoods actually weren't evicted at higher rates than men but were just more likely to collect eviction records than their male counterparts who lived in apartments off lease. Yet in black neighborhoods, a gender gap in formal evictions remained even after accounting for adults not listed on the lease. The Milwaukee Eviction Court Study (2011) accounted for all adults in the household, including those not listed on the Summons and Complaint. After doing so, black women continued to outnumber all other groups. They accounted for half of all adults living in households appearing in eviction court and 44 percent living in households that received eviction judgments. Black women were not only “marked” by eviction at higher rates; they were actually displaced at higher rates as well. A clerical tick did not explain away the high rate of eviction among black women.

Another consideration: in the inner city, women had a harder time making rent than male leaseholders. Although many black men were closed off from the workforce, those with jobs worked longer hours and got paid better wages than black women workers. In 2010, the median annual income for full-time workers in Milwaukee was $33,010 for black men and $29,454 for black women—a difference equivalent to five months of rent for the average Milwaukee apartment. Many women in the inner city also had more expenses. This was particularly true for single-mother households, which made up the majority of black households in Milwaukee. Single mothers often could not rely on regular support from their children's fathers, and because of their children, they had to seek out larger and more expensive housing options than noncustodial fathers, who could sleep on someone's couch or rent a room. Sherrena rented her inner-city rooming house rooms for $400 a month (utilities included), a good deal less than the two-bedroom units Arleen and other single mothers rented for $550 (utilities excluded). With Milwaukee's maximum occupancy limits in mind—widely interpreted as two heartbeats per bedroom—many landlords refused to rent single mothers smaller units. More heartbeats meant more bedrooms—and more rent. See City of Milwaukee Code of Ordinances, Chapter 200: Building and Zoning Code, Subchapter 8: “Occupancy and Use.” See Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty.”

11.
Manny Fernandez, “Still Home for the Holidays, When Evictions Halt,”
New York Times
, December 21, 2008.

12.
The “second cause” deals with unpaid rent; the “third cause” deals with property damage. In court, both causes are processed at the same time, leading to the legal lingo “second and third causes.”

13.
Between 2006 and 2010, Milwaukee Small Claims Court each year processed roughly 12,000 eviction cases but only 200 garnishments. I have excluded from this estimate garnishments in 2009, which for some reason were exceptionally high at 537. On eviction and garnishment filings, see State of Wisconsin,
2010 Annual Report: Milwaukee County Circuit Court, First Judicial District
, 2. On garnishment and execution statutes, see
Wisconsin Statues
§814 and §815.

14.
In Milwaukee's Landlord Training course, landlords were strongly encouraged to docket judgments. “The most important thing I'm going to ask you to do is to spend an extra five dollars and docket that judgment with the clerk of courts,” instructor Karen Long advised. “You want to add it to the credit report so that everyone out there knows that they owe you money….I'm asking you to do it for all of us who need to run credit reports on people….And also a couple years from now you might get a call, saying, ‘I'm George Jones. Remember me?' ‘Nope.' ‘Well, I was your tenant three years ago. You have a judgment against me for seven hundred and fifty bucks. I need to buy this car. Can I give you five hundred bucks and you call it even?' ” Karen went on to advise landlords to tell tenants about docketing: “I'm going to put this on your credit report, and nobody is going to lend you any money or lend you anything until you pay me. So it behooves you, you know, to not let any of this go on your record.”

15.
Rent Recovery Service will report tenants to major credit bureaus even if landlords do not have money judgments (
www.rentrecoveryservice.com
).

16.
In Milwaukee and many cities across the United States, the law offers few protections for tenants in arrears. “It's the ‘
what
' not the ‘
why
' that matters,” the landlord saying goes. In other words, the court typically does not care why tenants fell behind, only that they did. Arleen could have articulated her housing problems clearly; she could have brought pictures. Doing so probably wouldn't have made any difference. Once, upon learning that an elderly woman being evicted had lived without electricity for a month because her landlord was slow to repair the wiring, a court commissioner replied, “That isn't necessarily a fact we need to work out today.” Another time, a housing court judge listened patiently as a tenant described sewage in her bathtub and rotting floorboards. Then he responded, “You've told me everything except that you are current on your rent.”