Evicted (38 page)

17.
Tenants may have the right argument but the wrong presentation: too rough or meandering, too angry or meek. It would be naïve to think these considerations are uninformed by class, gender, and racial dynamics between tenants, landlords, and court actors. In the Landlord Training course, property owners are told, “The person who gets the loudest, and the noisiest, and the feistiest loses. So bite your tongue and go through it.” And even if landlords are new to eviction, many are educated members of the middle class, just like the court clerks, commissioners, and judges, who on account of their similar class position all speak the same language and speak it in the same way.

18.
Almost every landlord and building manager in Milwaukee that I met would agree. They felt that the court system was brazenly “pro-tenant,” that it resembled an “uneven playing field” tilted against property owners, or that commissioners liked to play
Let's Make a Deal
when they should just be issuing writs of restitution. Lenny Lawson was the sole exception. The court system “used to be for the tenants. It's not anymore,” he told me.

1.
According to Maudwella Kirkendoll, chief operating officer at Community Advocates (personal communication, December 19, 2014), 946 households benefited from the Homelessness Prevention Program in 2013. That year, the annual budget for that program was $646,000—all state- and city-distributed HUD dollars.

2.
The notice the Sheriff's Office sends to tenants states, “movers will not take food left in your refrigerator or freezer.” Movers do not take food to bonded storage, but they do place it on the curb.

3.
Jacob Riis,
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
(New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 129. On the psychology of scarcity, see Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir,
Scarcity: Why Having So Little Means So Much
(New York: Times Books, 2013).

4.
After the foreclosure crisis, several states passed laws requiring landlords to provide tenants in foreclosed properties with advance notice, and in May 2009 Congress passed the Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act, which requires landlords who acquire property through foreclosure to honor existing leases. But when riding along with Milwaukee's eviction squad in 2014, I met several tenants who simply did not know who their landlord was. The foreclosure crisis has caused urban rental property to be shuffled through many institutions, real estate companies, property-management firms, and private investors, leaving tenants bewildered. See Vicki Been and Allegra Glashausser, “Tenants: Innocent Victims of the Foreclosure Crisis,”
Albany Government Law Review
2 (2009): 1–28; Creola Johnson, “Renters Evicted En Masse: Collateral Damage Arising from the Subprime Foreclosure Crisis,”
Florida Law Review
62 (2010): 975–1008.

5.
Sheriff John and several movers told me about the eviction scenes listed in this paragraph.

6.
Results from the Milwaukee Area Renters Study revealed that while some low-income families suffer from “double disadvantage,” living in distressed neighborhoods and being embedded in impoverished networks, others, to put it plainly, live in relatively bad neighborhoods but have good networks and still others live in relatively good neighborhoods but have bad networks. Matthew Desmond and Weihua An, “Neighborhood and Network Disadvantage Among Urban Renters,”
Sociological Science
2 (2015): 329–50. See also Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein,
Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997), 189; Xavier de Souza Briggs, “Brown Kids in White Suburbs: Housing Mobility and the Many Faces of Social Capital,”
Housing Policy Debate
9 (1998): 177–221; Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,”
American Journal of Sociology
117 (2012): 1295–335; Carol Stack,
All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community
(New York: Basic Books, 1974), 77–78.

7.
Jacob Rugh and Douglas Massey, “Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis,”
American Sociological Review
75 (2010): 629–51; Signe-Mary McKernan et al.,
Less Than Equal: Racial Disparities in Wealth Accumulation
(Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2013); Thomas Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede, and Sam Osoro,
The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide
(Waltham, MA: Institute for Assets and Social Policy, 2013).

8.
According to Lenny's rent rolls, the month Larraine fell behind, so did forty-seven other families in the trailer park. The least amount owed was $3.88; the largest debt was Britney's.

9.
When I asked landlords what factors informed their decision to move forward with an eviction, they typically provided canned answers that had to do with only the financial side of things. But as I learned after spending a considerable amount of time with landlords, the reality was much more messy and arbitrary.

10.
Although unequal in status, male landlords and their male tenants, both having been socialized to the rhythms and postures of masculinity, could engage one another in ways they could each understand. Among landlords represented in Milwaukee's eviction records, men outnumber women almost 3 to 1. Milwaukee County eviction court records, 2003–2007.

11.
I observed some men avoid their landlords after receiving an eviction notice, just as I witnessed some women confront their landlords after receiving one. But because of the powerful ways gender guides interaction, providing individuals with expectations about appropriate ways to behave, a woman who aggressively confronted a landlord commonly was branded rude or out of line. This may be why Bob Helfgott, a landlord of twenty years who owned dozens of properties in poor neighborhoods, believed lesbians to be difficult tenants. “The gay women,” he said with a sigh. “That angry dyke thing, it drives me crazy. They're just terrible. Always complaining.” See Cecilia Ridgeway, “Interaction and the Conservation of Gender Inequality: Considering Employment,”
American Sociological Review
62 (1997): 218–35.

12.
Lewis Mumford,
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
(New York: MJF Books, 1961), 107, 110.

13.
Tobin and Lenny had had enough. But it is important to recognize that Larraine had nearly avoided eviction, as she had in the past, by borrowing money from a family member. Petitioning acquaintances, friends, or family members for help sometimes worked. But this was less often the case for black women. If black women “ducked and dodged” more than their white counterparts, the reason was that their social networks tended to be far more resource-deprived. Because white women tended to be connected to more people in better positions to help, they were more likely to avoid eviction. See Colleen Heflin and Mary Pattillo, “Poverty in the Family: Race, Siblings, and Socioeconomic Heterogeneity,”
Social Science Research
35 (2006): 804–22; Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,”
American Journal of Sociology
118 (2012): 88–133.

14.
I did not personally witness this event. The scene was reconstructed through multiple interviews with Larraine, Dave Brittain, some members of the moving crew, and other trailer park residents.

15.
Thanks to a new law (Wisconsin Act 76, Senate Bill 179), Wisconsin landlords now may dispose of evicted tenants' things in whatever manner they see fit. They now have the option of removing tenants' personal belongings themselves and are no longer required to store them. When the law was being debated, the Brittain brothers dipped into their personal savings to support constituents mobilizing against its passage. But they were up against big money. The Apartment Association of Southwestern Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Realtors, and the Wisconsin Apartment Association joined forces to support the bill they had helped craft. As one commenter put it: “This new law will benefit landlords and ‘good' tenants. ‘Bad' tenants (i.e., those that don't pay rent on time…) will not like this new law.” See Tristan Pettit, “ACT 76—Wisconsin's New Landlord-Tenant Law—Part 1: Background and Overview,”
Tristan's Landlord-Tenant Law
(blog), November 21, 2013.

1.
The declaration “I keep to myself” is commonly heard throughout poor communities. The practice of actually keeping to oneself is not commonly seen in those communities. Alexandra Murphy plumbs this tension in her paper “ ‘I Stay to Myself': What People Say Versus What They Do in a Poor Black Neighborhood,” working paper, University of Michigan, Department of Sociology.

2.
Most work on the underground economy focuses on the drug trade or sex work. But for every kid slinging dope or every prostitute on the stroll, there must be dozens and dozens of formally unemployed men working for cash or reduced rent, preparing landlords' properties. On the blurry line separating the formal and informal economy in American cities, see Sudhir Venkatesh,
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

1.
Researchers and legal scholars typically speculate that rents respond to market pressures (a city's vacancy rate) or policy interventions (providing legal aid). But sometimes landlords raise rents when they intuit that tenants can pay more. If Ricky One Leg couldn't pay, Belinda could. As Sherrena would say: “Ricky's in for a rude awakening. His rent is going up. I don't care. He can move….Because I'm sure Belinda's going to have some more…tenants. I'm taking his rent up fifty bucks.”

2.
Technically, gross rent may exceed the FMR payment standard if voucher holders are willing to pay the difference and if the unit passes rent reasonableness inspection.

3.
Deborah Devine,
Housing Choice Voucher Location Patterns: Implications for Participant and Neighborhood Welfare
(Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2003); George Galster, “Consequences from the Redistribution of Urban Poverty During the 1990s: A Cautionary Tale,”
Economic Development Quarterly
19 (2005): 119–25.

4.
Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011; US Department of Housing and Urban Development,
Final FY 2008 Fair Market Rent Documentation System
.

5.
Robert Collinson and Peter Ganong, “Incidence and Price Discrimination: Evidence from Housing Vouchers,” working paper, Harvard University and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2014; Eva Rosen,
The Rise of the Horizontal Ghetto: Poverty in a Post–Public Housing Era,
PhD diss. (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2014).

6.
The Milwaukee Area Renters Study offered a unique opportunity to investigate if voucher holders were being overcharged because the sample included assisted and unassisted renters. Working with Kristin Perkins, I merged addresses represented in the Milwaukee Area Renters Study data set with property records. Doing so provided detailed information on housing quality, including square footage, building age, assessed value per square foot, building type (duplex, single-family), amenities (fireplace, air-conditioning, garage), and housing problems. We also gathered several measures of neighborhood quality, including an area's poverty rate, racial composition, and median home value. Next, we controlled for neighborhood amenities like the distance to the nearest park, bus stop, and grocery store, as well as the average test scores for the school to which the address was zoned. A run of demographic variables about the renters was also included. Hedonic regression models estimated a significant relationship between holding a voucher and rent, with the voucher premium being an additional $49 to $70 a month, depending on model specification. Voucher holders also experienced more housing problems, which casts doubt on the idea that their higher rents reflect newer appliances or other perks not captured in the data. (For full models, see Matthew Desmond and Kristin Perkins, “Are Landlords Overcharging Voucher Holders?,” working paper, Harvard University, June 2015.) In 2010, 5,455 households in Milwaukee subsidized their housing costs with a rent-reducing voucher. Taking the results of our primary model, which includes 27 control variables and finds a $55 monthly rent premium for voucher holders, we estimate that the Housing Choice Voucher Program costs an additional $3.6 million each year in Milwaukee alone ($55 × 12 months × 5,455 vouchers). According to the City of Milwaukee, the average per-unit cost for a voucher-assisted household was $511 per month in 2010, or $6,126 a year. Dividing $3.6 million by $6,126 comes to roughly 588 additional families who could have been provided assistance if voucher holders were not overcharged. Some real estate manuals now include sections documenting profits that can be made from renting to voucher holders. See, e.g., Carleton H. Sheets,
Real Estate: The World's Greatest Wealth Builder
(Chicago: Bonus Books, 1998), 121.

7.
Charles Orlebeke, “The Evolution of Low-Income Housing Policy, 1949 to 1999,”
Housing Policy Debate
11 (2000): 489–520, 502.

8.
When Congress was debating the Taft-Ellender-Wagner bill, which would eventually become the Housing Act of 1949, the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards called public housing “the cutting edge of the Communist front.” The association waged a fierce battle—it funded radio appeals, penned editorials, and rallied its members to call their congressman—and might have won if the construction industry and its union, eager to pour concrete, hadn't flexed their muscle. The act passed by five votes. If it had not, federal provisions for public housing would have disappeared. See Louis Winnick, “The Triumph of Housing Allowance Programs: How a Fundamental Policy Conflict Was Resolved,”
Cityscape
1 (1995): 95–118, 101; Lawrence Vale,
From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 238–41.

When real estate developers in the mid-twentieth century backed public housing efforts to release coveted urban land for private enterprise, they were more the exception than the rule. Plus, those developers did not support public housing per se; they viewed it as a necessary vehicle through which to execute slum clearance and land grabs. Arnold Hirsch,
Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 104–34.

9.
See Philip Tegeler, Michael Hanley, and Judith Liben, “Transforming Section 8: Using Federal Housing Subsidies to Promote Individual Housing Choice and Desegregation,”
Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review
30 (1995): 451–86; Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, Pub. L. No. 93–383, § 101(a)(1), (c)(6), 88 Stat. 633, 633–34.

10.
On foreclosures of rental property, see Gabe Treves,
California Renters in the Foreclosure Crisis, Third Annual Report
(San Francisco: Tenants Together, 2011); Vicki Been and Allegra Glashausser, “Tenants: Innocent Victims of the Foreclosure Crisis,”
Albany Government Law Review
2 (2009); Matthew Desmond, “Housing Crisis in the Inner City,”
Chicago Tribune
, April 18, 2010; and Craig Karmin, Robbie Whelan, and Jeannette Neumann, “Rental Market's Big Buyers,”
Wall Street Journal
, October 3, 2012. Real estate investment manuals promoted investing in foreclosed and damaged properties long before the crash. “Distressed properties can literally make you rich,” one advised in 1998. “Banks don't like foreclosures. But real estate investors do, because foreclosures can be quick bargain buys.” Sheets,
Real Estate
, 231, 234.

11.
Dwight Jaffee, Anthony Lynch, Matthew Richardson, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, “Mortgage Organization and Securitization in the Financial Crisis,” in
Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System
, eds. Viral Acharya and Matthew Richardson (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 61–82.

12.
Kenneth Harney, “Even with Great Credit and Big Down Payment, Home Loans Will Cost More in 2011,”
Washington Post
, January 8, 2011.

13.
By one estimate, foreclosure discounts are on average 27 percent of the value of the property. John Campbell, Stefano Giglio, and Parag Pathak, “Forced Sales and House Prices,”
American Economic Review
101 (2011): 2108–121.

14.
I wasn't there when the door fell on Ruby and then Doreen. Later, I did see the door off its hinges and Doreen's swollen foot and confirmed this story with several Hinkstons.