Evicted (39 page)

1.
This was done so that the apartment would not sit vacant for any amount of time.

2.
I did not personally witness this event but reconstructed the scene after speaking with Arleen, Crystal, and Sherrena.

3.
A recent study estimated that between one-third and a half of youths aging out of foster care experience homelessness by the time they turn twenty-six. Amy Dworsky, Laura Napolitano, and Mark Courtney, “Homelessness During the Transition from Foster Care to Adulthood,”
American Journal of Public Health
103 (2013): S318–23.

4.
During everyday conversation, people in the trailer park and the inner city claimed to have no friends or an abundance of them, to be surrounded by supportive kin or estranged from them. Oftentimes, depending on their mood, their accounts of social ties and support varied widely from one day to the next. I came to view these accounts skeptically, interpreting them as a kind of data in their own right but not as accurate evaluations of people's social relationships. Problems arose not only when determining
who
was in someone's network but also when asking what those people
did.
Because giving increases your sense of self-worth and receiving diminishes it—ladling soup at the Salvation Army evokes a very different feeling from having it ladled into your bowl—there is good reason to expect people will overestimate the amount of support they give and underestimate the amount they receive. Ethnography allowed me to distinguish accounts of action from the action itself, and eviction, moreover, provided a unique occasion to compare what people said about the support they received from friends and family with support they actually received during that time of crisis. Eviction had a way of quickening ties, testing relationships, and revealing commitments, thereby drawing to the surface what was often submerged below the level of observation. Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,”
American Journal of Sociology
117 (2012): 1295–335.

5.
Carol Stack,
All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community
(New York: Basic Books, 1974), 93, 33, 43.

6.
Public programs like SSI and food stamps continue to incentivize living alone. If you live under another's roof and eat at her or his table, your SSI income is reduced by one-third. Larger households receive more food stamps—but not as much as members of that household would receive if they lived separately. For example, a couple that registered as a household could receive a maximum of $347 a month to spend on food. A couple that registered separately could receive a maximum of $189 a month each, or $378 combined. With some exceptions, everyone living together must apply to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, rather than separately. See US Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,
Applicants and Recipients
, December 30, 2013. On SSI living-arrangement requirements, see US Social Security Administration, “Simplifying the Supplemental Security Income Program: Options for Eliminating the Counting of In-Kind Support and Maintenance,”
Social Security Bulletin
68 (November 4, 2008); Brendan O'Flaherty,
Making Room: The Economics of Homelessness
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 222. On kin dependence and AFDC, see M. Lisette Lopez and Carol Stack, “Social Capital and the Culture of Power: Lessons from the Field,” in
Social Capital and Poor Communities,
eds. Susan Saegert et al. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 31–59. Milwaukee renters receiving SSI have lower levels of crowding than their counterparts, even after controlling for income. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.

7.
When it came to meeting basic needs, poor kin had always been greater assets than middle-class relatives. See Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor”; Stack,
All Our Kin
, 77–78.

8.
Single mothers like Arleen could not make ends meet on welfare alone: on average, welfare, food stamps, and SSI payments covered only about three-fifths of single mothers' expenses. Even after attempting to make up the difference by working side jobs and seeking help from agencies, many endured severe hardship, going hungry or forgoing winter clothing and medical care. Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein,
Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997).

9.
See, for example, Lee Rainwater,
Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum
(Chicago: Aldine, 1970), 73; Sandra Susan Smith,
Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism Among the Black Poor
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007). For an extended treatment, see Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor.” Other ethnographers have documented similar network dynamics in poor neighborhoods: see Elliot Liebow,
Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 163–65, 182; Rainwater,
Behind Ghetto Walls
, 73. Of course, these dynamics can be observed at all levels of society. The tendency to rely on perfect strangers for emotional comfort, for example, is fairly common among the middle class, as evidenced by the so-called “stranger on a plane” phenomenon. Although poor people's strategy of relying on disposable ties is not different in kind from the tendency of rich people to rely on strangers, it often is different in degree. It is only the poor who routinely rely on disposable ties to meet basic human needs.

10.
People see neighborhoods as much more than school districts and the usual ecological indicators. They see things much too personal to quantify but powerful enough to attract them to or repel them from entire sections of the city.

11.
Crystal had allowed her food stamps to lapse after her grandmother died the year before. She remembered her grandmother's death causing her to fall into a dark depression. “I didn't do shit. Sleep all day. Get in the shower. Eat. Go back in the house and go back to sleep. I shut down—on everything and everybody.” It was another example of how a trauma exacerbated poverty.

12.
That is, Crystal used an insult in place of Jori's name.

1.
On the North Side, white landlords often hired black property managers. Said Sherrena, “There's a lot of white boys [who] come down from Brookfield here, and they buy all this inner-city shit….And they will hire a black property manager to handle things for them….The white boy will hire a black guy, maybe that looks a little mean and can keep up stuff, and they'll bawl 'em. It's easy.” Sherrena meant the property manager would not hesitate to yell at tenants (“bawl them out”) if they didn't pay up. See Jennifer Lee, “Cultural Brokers: Race-Based Hiring in Inner-City Neighborhoods,”
American Behavioral Scientist
41 (1998): 927–37.

2.
Mortgage and release records were retrieved from the Milwaukee County Register of Deeds.

3.
Tobin and Lenny's rent records showed that during most months five trailers sat empty and forty tenants were behind, the average amount owed in a month being $340. Five vacancies a month left 126 trailers paying an average of $550 in monthly rent. Subtract from that total missed rent payments in the amount of $163,200 (40 × $340 × 12). This reduction was probably too drastic for two reasons. First, Tobin did not carry out anything close to forty evictions a month; so most people found a way to satisfy their debts. Second, missing payment estimates were based on summer-month totals (the trailer park's rent rolls from April to July 2008) when nonpayments and evictions spiked. Nevertheless, I have kept these likely inflated reductions to generate a conservative estimate. Tobin's overhead consisted of Lenny and Susie, whose combined annual salaries and rent reductions ran just shy of $50,000. Lenny's annual salary and rent waiver totaled $42,600 ($36,000 + $6,600), and Susie's salary and rent reduction totaled $6,400. (Tobin considered Susie a part-time employee, whom he paid $5 an hour for twenty hours a week; or: [$5/hr × 20 hours × 52] + $1,200 in reduced rent.) With respect to maintenance, all but twenty trailers were “owned,” which meant tenants footed most repair bills. Estimated regular maintenance costs rarely exceeded $5,000 a month, even after accounting for money paid for grass cutting and litter pickup. But I have kept this likely inflated estimate as well. Tobin's property taxes were $49,457 in 2008, and his water bill was $26,708 that year. (Both figures were pulled from public records.) Tenants paid gas and electricity. Eviction court costs? Tobin averaged three formal evictions a month, and didn't use a lawyer unless cases got tricky, which would mean he paid less than $7,000 a year in eviction court, sheriff, and lawyer fees. (If Tobin evicted an average of three tenants a month, then his annual baseline court costs could come to $3,222 [$89.50 × 3 cases × 12 months]. I doubled that number to account for irregular sheriff, mover, and lawyer fees and rounded up to $7,000.) Trash? Lenny told me that the bill for managing the two Dumpsters ran $800 a month (or $9,600 a year). Lighting? Tobin paid for the outdoor lighting (installed to utility poles) that lit the trailer park at night. Using We Energies standard rates, I budgeted $5,000 a year for this expense (plus the office's electricity bill). Incidentals? I budgeted an additional $15,000 for advertisements and Lenny's rent-collection bonuses. That leaves $446,635 a year. I excluded large, one-time maintenance expenses from this calculation—like when Tobin had speed bumps installed within the park—because they were rare and irregular. Lenny thought my estimate was too low. He believed Tobin took home “more like six hundred thousand” a year.

1.
John Gurda,
The Making of Milwaukee
, 3rd ed. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2008 [1999]), 174.

2.
In my experience, disadvantaged neighborhoods were characterized not by the presence of an “oppositional culture” as much as by a palpable lack of one.

3.
Robert Fogelson,
The Great Rent Wars: New York, 1917–1929
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 85, 86.

4.
Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward,
Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail
(New York: Vintage, 1979), 12, 4.

5.
Fogelson,
Great Rent Wars
, 88.

6.
This finding is based on a negative binomial regression model applied to the full Milwaukee Area Renters Study (2009–2011) sample. To measure “community support,” respondents were asked if they ever had helped someone in their current neighborhood (a) pay bills or buy groceries, (b) get a job, (c) fix their housing or car, (d) by supporting them emotionally, or (e) by watching their children. Neighborhood disadvantage was measured by a factor-loaded scale composed of median household income, violent crime rate, and the percentages of families below the poverty line, of the population under eighteen, of residents with less than a high school education, of residents receiving public assistance, and of vacant housing units. In a paper with Weihua An, I found neighborhood disadvantage to be positively associated with community support, net of income, education, residential mobility, race, age, gender, employment status, and network composition. Residents in disadvantaged neighborhoods with strong ties to homeowners and the college educated were just as likely to offer support to their neighbors as those who lacked such ties. This suggests the strong presence of local gift exchange in distressed neighborhoods, one relatively unaffected by the composition of people's extended networks. See Matthew Desmond and Weihua An, “Neighborhood and Network Disadvantage Among Urban Renters,”
Sociological Science
2 (2015): 329–50.

7.
Support systems that arise organically in poor neighborhoods help people eat and cope, but they also expose them to heavy doses of trauma and sometimes violence. Bruce Western, “Lifetimes of Violence in a Sample of Released Prisoners,”
Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences
, forthcoming.

8.
Harvey Zorbaugh,
The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago's Near North Side
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 70.

9.
This finding is based on an ordered logistic regression model applied to the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. The outcome variable is political capacity. Respondents were asked: “How likely is it that people in this neighborhood would ever organize and work together to improve their community and their lives: not at all, a little bit, somewhat, quite a bit, or a great deal?” The primarily explanatory variable is a measure of perceived neighborhood trauma. Respondents were asked: “While you have been living in this neighborhood, have any of your neighbors ever: (a) been evicted; (b) been in prison; (c) been in an abusive relationship; (d) been addicted to drugs; (e) had their children taken away by social services; (f) had a close family member or friend murdered?” Answers were summed. The full model documents a significant negative relationship between political capacity and perceived neighborhood trauma, controlling for prior political involvement, tenure in neighborhood, neighborhood poverty and crime rates, and a run of demographic factors. See Matthew Desmond and Adam Travis, “Perceived Neighborhood Trauma and Political Capacity,” unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, 2015. On the perception of social disorder mattering more than disorder itself, see Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager, “Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime,”
American Journal of Sociology
107 (2001): 717–67; Robert Sampson,
Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

10.
During the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, respondents were asked: “What two words would best describe your landlord?” Two independent coders assigned a value to each word, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. Words like “slumlord” and “asshole” were assigned 1's and words like “excellent” and “loving” were assigned 10's. More muted critiques or compliments were assigned a midrange value. The coders' scores were then averaged to produce an overall rating. The average renter in Milwaukee, according to this ranking, sees her or his landlord as a 6. Renters with extreme housing burden did not rate their landlord better or worse than other renters did. But those who experienced housing problems saw their landlord in a significantly more negative light.

11.
Tenants did bind together upon learning that the trailer park might be shut down; this was their “extraordinary moment.” But after that moment passed, things went back to normal. They did not question the rent, fight for better housing conditions, or assign a political narrative to evictions. Their quibble had been with their alderman, not their landlord. Once, tenants did circulate a petition. It asked for the removal of a woman seen as a snitch and general troublemaker. “We are asking that Grace in trailer S12 be evicted from the trailer park before matters get worse…” the petition read. “We feel the only way to resolve this problem is to remove her before someone resolves it, and we don't need for it to come to that.” Forty people signed what came to be known as the Petition Against Grace.