Evicted (45 page)

43.
On food prices in poor neighborhoods, see Chanjin Chung and Samuel Myers, “Do the Poor Pay More for Food? An Analysis of Grocery Store Availability and Food Price Disparities,”
Journal of Consumer Affairs
33 (1999): 276–96; Marianne Bitler and Steven Haider, “An Economic View of Food Deserts in the United States,”
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management
30 (2011): 153–76.

44.
Lizabeth Cohen,
A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
(New York: Knopf, 2008), 40; Elizabeth Blackmar,
Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 237–38; Jacob Riis,
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
(New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 30; Allan Spear,
Black Chicago:
The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,”
American Journal of Sociology
118 (2012): 88–133. Of all people, Daniel Patrick Moynihan recognized the central importance of exploitation to understanding racialized urban poverty. In his report to the US Department of Labor that would later become infamous, Moynihan wrote: “The Negro situation is commonly perceived by whites in terms of the visible manifestation of discrimination and poverty….It is more difficult, however, for whites to perceive the effect that three centuries of exploitation have had on the fabric of Negro society itself….Here is where the true injury has occurred: unless this damage is repaired, all the effort to end discrimination and poverty and injustice will come to little.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action
(Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, 1965).

45.
This point is indebted to Satter's
Family Properties
.

46.
On rip-off schemes, see Alan Andreasen,
The Disadvantaged Consumer
(New York: The Free Press, 1975); Michael Lewis,
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
(New York: Norton, 2010), 20; David Caplovitz,
The Poor Pay More
(New York: The Free Press, 1967). On payday loans, see Pew Charitable Trust,
Payday Lending in America: Who Borrows, Where They Borrow, and Why
(Washington, DC: Pew, July 19, 2012); Gary Rivlin,
Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.
(New York: Harper, 2010).

47.
On markets being embedded in state and social relations, see Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,”
American Journal of Sociology
91 (1985): 481–510; Karl Polanyi,
The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [1944]). On the relationship between poverty and policing, see Megan Comfort, “When Prison Is a Refuge: America's Messed Up,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, December 2, 2013; David Garland,
The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Loïc Wacquant,
Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Bruce Western,
Punishment and Inequality in America
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006); Alice Goffman,
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

48.
Oliver Cromwell Cox,
Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics
(New York: Doubleday and Company, 1948), 238.

49.
Katie Dodd
, Quarterly Benefits Summary
(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Department for Work and Pensions, 2015); Hugo Priemus, Peter Kemp, and David Varady, “Housing Vouchers in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands: Current Issues and Future Perspectives,”
Housing Policy Debate
16 (2005): 575–609; “Housing Benefit: How Does It Work?,” BBC News, November 9, 2011.

50.
No study has shown that, compared to housing vouchers, project-based assistance can deliver housing at equal quality for less cost. On the cost of public housing compared to vouchers, see Janet Currie,
The Invisible Safety Net: Protecting the Nation's Poor Children and Families
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chapter 4; Amy Cutts and Edgar Olsen, “Are Section 8 Housing Subsidies Too High?,”
Journal of Housing Economics
11 (2002): 214–43.

On neighborhood quality of voucher holders compared to public housing residents, see Sandra Newman and Ann Schnare, “ ‘…And a Suitable Living Environment': The Failure of Housing Programs to Deliver on Neighborhood Quality,”
Housing Policy Debate
8 (1997): 703–41; Edgar Olsen, “Housing Programs for Low-Income Households,” in
Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States
, ed. Robert Moffitt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 365–442.

51.
Brian Jacob and Jens Ludwig, “The Effects of Housing Assistance on Labor Supply: Evidence from a Voucher Lottery,”
American Economic Review
102 (2012): 272–304; Mark Shroder, “Does Housing Assistance Perversely Affect Self-Sufficiency? A Review Essay,”
Journal of Housing Economics
11 (2002): 381–417; Sandra Newman, Scott Holupka, and Joseph Harkness, “The Long-Term Effects of Housing Assistance on Work and Welfare,”
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management
28 (2009): 81–101.

52.
Tellingly, countries with universal housing programs do not have minimum housing standards like America's limited voucher program does. When everyone in the country can afford decent housing, you don't need minimum standards because empowered renters can take their voucher elsewhere. Priemus et al., “Housing Vouchers in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands,” 582.

53.
Riis,
How the Other Half Lives
, 201.

54.
A universal voucher program would not solve all our problems. Especially in tight markets, vouchers cannot fully shield tenants from rent inflation. Only significant government regulation (like rent control) or market alterations (like expanding housing supply) can do that.

In fact, there is some evidence—it is thin—that our current voucher program might be driving up everybody's rent: not only voucher holders' but unassisted renters' too. The main reason is simple. If millions of poor people opt out of the private market for public housing, that will lower demand and, thus, rent at the bottom of the market. If those people are reintroduced to the private market, voucher in hand, that will increase demand and, with it, rent. One study found that cities with more housing vouchers experienced steeper rent hikes and that, on the whole, vouchers have cost unassisted families more than they have saved assisted ones. (See Scott Susin, “Rent Vouchers and the Price of Low-Income Housing,”
Journal of Public Economics
83 [2002]: 109–52.) And landlord how-to guides offer the following advice: “I also like to check the going rate for public housing, i.e., government funded rental subsidies, as a benchmark of what you can command in rent.” (Bryan M. Chavis,
Buy It, Rent It, Profit! Make Money as a Landlord in Any Real Estate Market
[New York: Touchstone, 2009], 70.) Studies also have found no relationship between the concentration of voucher holders and the overall price of rental housing. For example, the Experimental Housing Allowance Program (EHAP) found that housing vouchers had a negligible effect on marketwide rents. William Apgar has attributed this result to the fact that markets were insufficiently saturated with vouchers and that rents were artificially depressed during the study's time period. Drawing on the EHAP's findings, simulation studies conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Urban Institute “suggested that a housing allowance could indeed trigger significant price increases for both recipients and nonrecipients, as well as encourage disinvestment and abandonment of units that do not meet program standards.” See William Apgar Jr., “Which Housing Policy Is Best?,”
Housing Policy Debate
1 (1990): 1–32, 9. See also Michael Eriksen and Amanda Ross, “Housing Vouchers and the Price of Rental Housing,” working paper, University of Georgia, 2015.

55.
Matthew Desmond and Kristin Perkins, “Are Landlords Overcharging Voucher Holders?,” working paper, Harvard University, June 2015; Cutts and Olsen, “Are Section 8 Housing Subsidies Too High?”; Olsen, “Housing Programs for Low-Income Households.” On housing cost regulation, see Tommy Andersson and Lars-Gunnar Svensson, “Non-Manipulable House Allocation with Rent Control,”
Econometrica
82 (2014): 507–39; Richard Arnott, “Time for Revisionism on Rent Control?,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
9 (1995): 99–120.

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development recently released a plan to provide voucher holders “with subsidies that better reflect the localized rental market” by proposing “Small Area Fair Market Rents” that “vary by ZIP code and support a greater range of payment standards than can be achieved under existing regulations.” See US Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Establishing a More Effective Fair Market Rent (FMR) System; Using Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs) in Housing Choice Voucher Program Instead of the Current 50th Percentile FMRs; Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,”
Federal Register
80 (June 2, 2015): 31332–36.

56.
Bipartisan Policy Center,
Housing America's Future: New Directions for National Policy
(Washington, DC: Bipartisan Policy Center, 2013), chapter 4. For technical documentation of projected cost estimates, see Larry Buron, Bulbul Kaul, and Jill Khadduri,
Estimates of Voucher-Type and Emergency Rental Assistance for Unassisted Households
(Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates, 2012). In 2012, federal expenditures to homeowners amounted to roughly $200 billion. See Will Fischer and Barbara Sard,
Chart Book: Federal Housing Spending Is Poorly Matched to Need
(Washington, DC: Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 2013). For another cost estimate of an open-enrollment housing voucher program, see William Grigsby and Steven Bourassa, “Section 8: The Time for Fundamental Program Change?,”
Housing Policy Debate
15 (2004): 805–34. This study estimated that expanding housing vouchers to renting families below the 50th percentile in median income for their area would require an additional $43 billion, which at the time amounted to 2.5 percent of federal outlays.

57.
Schwartz,
Housing Policy in the United States
, 45–47.

58.
Ibid. Executive Office of the President,
Budget of the United States Government: Fiscal Year 2008
(Washington, DC: Office of the President, 2008).

59.
Harrington,
The Other America
, 157–58. A. Scott Henderson,
Housing and the Democratic Ideal: The Life and Thought of Charles Abrams
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Peter Dreier, “Federal Housing Subsidies: Who Benefits and Why?,” in
A Right to Housing: Foundation for a New Social Agenda
, eds. Rachel Bratt, Michael Stone, and Chester Hartman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 105–38.

1.
For a fuller explanation, see Matthew Desmond, “Relational Ethnography,”
Theory and Society
43 (2014): 547–79. See also Mustafa Emirbayer, “Manifesto for Relational Sociology,”
American Journal of Sociology
103 (1997): 281–317; Eric Wolf,
Europe and the People Without a History
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982); Stanley Lieberson,
Making It Count: The Improvement of Social Research and Theory
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).

2.
Mitchell Duneier,
Sidewalk
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 337–39.

3.
There's this idea that ethnography is a “method.” When we see it this way, we tend to ask methodological questions about it.
How do I get my project approved by the IRB? When should I write field notes?
I tend to think of ethnography as a
sensibility
, a “way of seeing” as the anthropologist Harry Wolcott once put it. This means that ethnography isn't something we go and do. It's a fundamental way of being in the world. If we think of ethnography this way, then we begin to ask different questions.
How can I get strangers to talk with me? How can I become more observant?
If we approach ethnography as a sensibility, then we can begin cultivating a set of skills or disciplines long before we actually enter the field. It is possible to transform yourself into an ethnographer—day in, day out—so that when the time comes for you to set foot in the field, you already are one. (It also helps to get rid of your smartphone.) Harry Wolcott,
Ethnography: A Way of Seeing
(Lanham: Rowman Altamira, 1999). On the violence of interpretation, see Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in
A Susan Sontag Reader
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 99.

4.
When I lived in the trailer park, I didn't know that Scott was so depressed that he was planning on killing himself via overdose. Once, he asked me for a large sum of money. I said no and shudder when I recall that I contemplated saying yes.

5.
See Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond, “Race and Reflexivity,”
Ethnic and Racial Studies
35 (2012): 574–99.

6.
I did not rely on any qualitative data software.

7.
The fact-checker was Gillian Brassil. I provided Gillian with all of my field notes after she signed a nondisclosure agreement. Gillian corroborated accounts by conducting background research (e.g., police data, legal statutes), almost thirty independent interviews, and reviewing public records as well as my field notes, photographs, and transcripts of my digital recordings. Besides asking for documentation for several details recorded in this book, Gillian also randomly selected 10 percent of the book manuscript's pages and asked me to show her where she could find corresponding scenes or observations in the field notes. Often, she requested photographs or official documents to support claims.

8.
I provided a copy of the manuscript (either the entire work or relevant chapters) to everyone featured prominently in its pages. In some cases, I read relevant portions to people to check factual details.

9.
Policy wonks and poverty researchers never tire of debating the details of this or that housing policy. Of policies that serve a sliver of the urban poor, they ask a hundred questions. According to Google Scholar, there are more than 4,800 scholarly articles and books in which the phrase “Moving to Opportunity” appears in the text. This neighborhood relocation initiative designed to move families out of disadvantaged neighborhoods was a bold and important program—which served roughly 4,600 households. In other words, by now every family who benefited from Moving to Opportunity could have their own study in which their program was mentioned. We know much more about public housing, which serves less than 2 percent of the population, than about inner-city landlords and their properties, which constitute the bulk of housing for the ghetto poor. We know much more about housing vouchers, enjoyed by the lucky minority of low-income families, than about how the majority of low-income families make ends meet unassisted in the private rental market. In 1995, Richard Arnott observed that economists' “focus on rent control has diverted attention from more important housing policy issues….Not a single paper has been published in a leading journal during the last decade dealing with low-income housing problems.” Richard Arnott, “Time for Revisionism on Rent Control?,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
9 (1995): 99–120, 117.

10.
Matthew Desmond and Tracey Shollenberger, “Forced Displacement from Rental Housing: Prevalence and Neighborhood Consequences,”
Demography
, forthcoming.

11.
Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,”
American Journal of Sociology
118 (2012): 88–133.

12.
Doubly robust logistic regression models, as well as several matching analyses, were used to estimate the odds of receiving an eviction judgment. Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011. For models, see Matthew Desmond et al., “Evicting Children,”
Social Forces
(2013) 92: 303–27.

13.
Go to
https://thedata.harvard.edu
.

14.
Just over half of Milwaukee's housing units are occupied by renters, a proportion similar to those in other cities (e.g., Chicago, Houston, Baltimore). In terms of median rent, Milwaukee County ranks 1,420th out of 4,763 counties in the United States and Puerto Rico. Cities with similar rent distributions include Portland, OR; Charlotte, NC; Gary, IN; and Baton Rouge, LA. Cities with a stalwart tradition of tenant unionizing and an economically diverse rental population—e.g., Boston, Los Angeles—tend to boast of toothier tenant protections than those, like Milwaukee, in which most middle- and upper-class households own their home. But most cities' renter protections more closely resemble Milwaukee's than Boston's or Los Angeles's. See National Multifamily Housing Council,
Quick Facts: Resident Demographics
(Washington, DC: National Multifamily Housing Council, 2009); US Department of Housing and Urban Development,
50th Percentile Rent Estimates for 2010
(Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2010).

15.
To paraphrase Elliot Liebow,
Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 15.

16.
Clifford Geertz,
Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 5.

17.
The rise of first-person ethnographic narration is the product of the postmodern turn in anthropology, which focused attention on the politics and biases of the author. Before that, much of ethnography was written in the third person. The authors of
The Taxi-Dance Hall
(1932) or
Street Corner Society
(1943) or even
Tally's Corner
(1967) are hardly on the page.