Top Quotes: “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” — Matthew Desmond

“Every so often, a car turned off Sixth Street to navigate Arthur Avenue, hemmed in by the snow, and that’s when the boys would take aim. Jori packed a tight one and let it fly. The car jerked to a stop, and a man jumped out. The boys ran inside and locked the door to the apartment where Jori lived with his mother, Arleen, nd younger brother, Jafaris. The lock was cheap, and the man broke down the door with a few hard-heeled kicks. He left before anything else happened. When the landlord found out about the loot, she decided to evict Arleen and her boys. They had been here eight months.

The day Arleen and her boys had to be out was cold. But if she waited any longer, the landlord would summon the sheriff, who would arrive with a gun, a team of boot-footed movers, and a folded judge’s order saying that her house was no longer hers. She would be given two options: truck or curb. “Truck” would mean that her things would be loaded into an eighteen-footer and later checked into bonded storage. She could get everything back after paying $350. Arleen didn’t have $350, so she would have opted for “curb,” which would mean watching the movers pile everything onto the sidewalk. Her mattresses. A floor-model television. Her copy of Don’t Be Afraid to Discipline. Her nice glass dining table and the lace tablecloth that fit just-so. Silk plants. Bibles. The meat cuts in the freezer. The shower curtain. Jafaris’s asthma machine. Arleen took her sons — Jori was thirteen, Jafaris was five — to a homeless shelter, which everyone called the Lodge so you could tell your kids, “We’re staying at the Lodge tonight,” like it was a motel. The two-story stucco building could have passed for one, except for all the Salvation Army signs. Arleen stayed in the 120-bed shelter until April, when she found a house on Nineteenth and Hampton, in the predominantly black inner city.”

“Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. They used to draw crowds. Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, even though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today. A New York Times account of community resistance to the eviction of three Bronx families in February 1932 observed, “Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000.” Sometimes neighbors confronted the marshals directly, sitting on the evicted family’s furniture to prevent its removal or moving the family back in despite the judge’s orders. The marshals themselves were ambivalent about carrying out evictions. It wasn’t why they carried a badge and a gun.

These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. There are hundreds of data-mining companies that sell landlords tenant screening reports listing past evictions and court filings. These days, housing courts swell, forcing commissioners to settle cases in hallways or makeshift offices crammed with old desks and broken file cabinets — and most tenants don’t even show up. Low-income families have grown used to the rumble of moving trucks, the early-morning knocks at the door, the belongings lining the curb.

Families have watched their incomes stagnate, or even fall, while their housing costs have soared. Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on. Millions of Americans are evicted every year because they can’t make rent.”

“Some landlords pay tenants a couple hundred dollars to leave by the end of the week. Some take off the front door. Nearly half of all forced moves experienced by renting families in Milwaukee are “informal evictions” that take place in the shadow of the law. If you count all forms of involuntary displacement — formal and informal evictions, landlord foreclosures, building condemnations — you discover that between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move.

There is nothing special about Milwaukee when it comes to eviction. The numbers are similar in Kansas City, Cleveland, Chicago, and other cities. In 2013, 1 in 8 poor renting families nationwide were unable to pay all of their rent, and a similar number thought it was likely they would be evicted soon. This book is set in Milwaukee, but it tells an American story.”

“There was no hedging in this business. When a tenant didn’t pay $500, her landlord lost $500. When that happened, landlords with mortgages dug into their savings or their income to make sure the bank didn’t hand them a foreclosure notice. There were no euphemisms either: no “downsizing,” no “quarterly losses.” Landlords took the gains and losses directly; they saw the deprivation and waste up close.”

“Sherrena decided to specialize in renting to the black poor.

Four years later, she owned thirty-six units, all in the inner city, and took to carrying a pair of cell phones with backup batteries, reading Forbes, renting office space, and accepting appointments from nine a.m. to nine p.m. Quentin quit his job and started working as Sherrena’s property manager and buying buildings of his own. Sherrena started a credit-repair business and an investment business. She purchased two fifteen-passenger vans and started Prisoner Connections LLC, which for $25 to $50 a seat transported girlfriends and mothers and children to visit their incarcerated loved ones upstate. Sherrena had found her calling: inner-city entrepreneur.”

“In Milwaukee and across the nation, most renters were responsible for keeping the lights and heat on, but that had become increasingly difficult to do. Since 2000, the cost of fuels and utilities had risen by more than 50 percent, thanks to increasing global demand and the expiration of price caps. In a typical year, almost 1 in 5 poor renting families nationwide missed payments and received a disconnection notice from their utility company.” Families who couldn’t both make rent and keep current with the utility company sometimes paid a cousin or neighbor to reroute the meter. As much as $6 billion worth of power was pirated across America every year. Only cars and credit cards got stolen more. Stealing gas was much more difficult and rare. It was also unnecessary in the wintertime, when the city put a moratorium on disconnections.”

“In the mid-1980s, crack hit the streets of Milwaukee, and Lamar started smoking it. He got hooked. His coworkers at Athea knew it because he wouldn’t have cigarette money a couple days after payday. Lamar remembered losing his job and apartment. After that, he took Luke and Eddy to shelters and abandoned houses, tearing up the carpet so they could have a blanket at night. Luke and Eddy’s mother was around back then, but her addiction eventually consumed her, and she gave up her boys. Lamar ate snow during the days he was trapped in the abandoned house. His feet swelled purple and black with frostbite until they looked like rotten fruit. He was delirious when, on the eighth day, he jumped out of an upper-floor window. He would say God threw him out. When he woke up in the hospital, his legs were gone. Except for two brief relapses, he had not smoked crack since.”

“She received the same stipend in 2008 that she would have when welfare was reformed over a decade earlier: $20.65 a day, $7,536 a year. Since 1997, welfare stipends in Milwaukee and almost everywhere else have not budged, even as housing costs have soared. For years, politicians have known that families could not survive on welfare alone. This was the case before rent and utility costs climbed throughout the 2000s, and it was even more true afterward.”

“One day on a whim, Arleen stopped by the Housing Authority and asked about the List. A woman behind the glass told her, “The List is frozen.” On it were over 3,500 families who had applied for rent assistance four years earlier. Arleen nodded and left with hands in her pockets. It could have been worse. In larger cities like Washington, DC, the wait for public housing was counted in decades. In those cities, a mother of a young child who put her name on the List might be a grandmother by the time her application was reviewed.

Most poor people in America were like Arleen: they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.

If Arleen wanted public housing, she would have to save a month’s worth of income to repay the Housing Authority for leaving her subsidized apartment without giving notice; then wait two to three years until the List unfroze; then wait another two to five years until her application made it to the top of the pile; then pray to Jesus that the person with the stale coffee and heavy stamp reviewing her file would somehow overlook the eviction record she’d collected while trying to make ends meet in the private housing market on a welfare check.”

“At the time, median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee was $600. Ten percent of units rented at or below $480, and 10 percent rented at or above $750. A mere $270 separated some of the cheapest units in the city from some of the most expensive. That meant that rent in some of the worst neighborhoods was not drastically cheaper than rent in much better areas. For example, in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where at least 40 percent of families lived below the poverty line, median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was only $50 less than the citywide median. Sherrena put it like this: “A two bedroom is a two bedroom is a two bedroom.”

This had long been the case. When tenements began appearing in New York City in the mid-1800s, rent in the worst slums was 30 percent higher than in uptown. In the 1920s and ’30s, rent for dilapidated housing in the black ghettos of Milwaukee and Philadelphia and other northern cities exceeded that for better housing in white neighborhoods. As late as 1960, rent in major cities was higher for blacks than for whites in similar accommo-dations. The poor did not crowd into slums because of cheap housing. They were there and this was especially true of the black poor simply because they were allowed to be.

Landlords at the bottom of the market generally did not lower rents to meet demand and avoid the costs of all those missed payments and evictions. There were costs to avoiding those costs too. For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetually behind; and many poor tenants would be perpetually behind because their rent was too high.

Tenants able to pay their rent in full each month could take advantage of legal protections designed to keep their housing safe and decent. Not only could they summon a building inspector without fear of eviction, but they also had the right to withhold rent until certain repairs were made. But when tenants fell behind, these protections dissolved.”

“When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond by neglecting repairs. Or as Sherrena put it to tenants: “If I give you a break, you give me a break.” Tenants could trade their dignity and children’s health for a roof over their head. Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem.” More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems — as were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did not.

Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted. But from a business point of view, this arrangement could be lucrative. The four-family property that included Doreen’s and Lamar’s apartments was Sherrena’s most profitable. Her second-most profitable property was Arleen’s place on Thirteenth Street. In Sherrena’s portfolio, her worst properties yielded her biggest returns.”

“The small act of screening could have big consequences. From thousands of yes/no decisions emerged a geography of advantage and disadvantage that characterized the modern American city: good schools and failing ones, safe streets and dangerous ones. Landlords were major players in distributing the spoils. They decided who got to live where. And their screening practices (or lack thereof) revealed why crime and gang activity or an area’s civic engagement and its spirit of neighborliness could vary drastically from one block to the next. They also helped explain why on the same block in the same low-income neighborhood, one apartment complex but not another became familiar to the police.

Screening practices that banned criminality and poverty in the same stroke drew poor families shoulder to shoulder with drug dealers, sex offenders, and other lawbreakers in places with lenient requirements. Neighborhoods marred by high poverty and crime were that way not only because poverty could incite crime, and crime could invite poverty, but also because the techniques landlords used to “keep illegal and destructive activity out of rental property” kept poverty out as well. This also meant that violence, drug activity, deep poverty, and other social problems coalesced at a much smaller, more acute level than the neighborhood. They gathered at the same address.”

“In Milwaukee’s poorest black neighborhoods, eviction had become commonplace — especially for women. In those neighborhoods, 1 female renter in 17 was evicted through the court system each year, which was twice as often as men from those neighborhoods and nine times as often as women from the city’s poorest white areas. Women from black neighborhoods made up 9 percent of Milwaukee’s population and 30 percent of its evicted tenants.°

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

“She tried not to go to parts of the city where [her presence was questioned]. Patrice lived four miles away from the shore of Lake Michigan: an hour on foot, a half hour by bus, fifteen minutes by car. She had never been.”

“Arleen remembered when they used to take a break from doing evictions around Christmas-time in Milwaukee. But they did away with that in 1991, after a landlord convinced the American Civil Liberties Union to argue that the practice was an unfair religious celebration. Some old-timers still observed the moratorium out of kindness or habit or ignorance. Sherrena was not one of them.”

“Each eviction case had two parts. The “first cause of action” dealt strictly with whether a tenant would be evicted. Next came “the second and third causes of action,” which dealt with what was owed to a landlord: unpaid rent, court fees, and other damages. Most tenants taken to eviction court were sued twice — once for the property and a second time for the debt — and so had two court dates. But even fewer tenants showed up for their second hearing than for their first, which meant landlords’ claims about what was owed them usually went unchallenged. Suing a tenant for back rent and court fees was straightforward. Landlords were allowed to charge for unpaid rent, late fees the court found reasonable, and double rent for each day tenants remained in the home after their tenancy had been terminated. Things got murkier when tallying up property damages. Sometimes Sherrena guessed an amount on the ride over to eviction court. “How much should I put for the back door: One fifty? Two hundred?” Sometimes she added on an extermination fee even though Quentin would take care of it himself. When the charges didn’t give them pause, callers approved landlords’ second and third causes with a quick punch of the stamp. When they did, callers pushed the claim up to a commissioner.”

“Gramling Perez brought Sherrena’s charges from $5,000 down to $1,285. That money judgment joined those of the eight other eviction cases Sherrena initiated earlier that month, which together totaled over $10,000. Sherrena knew that receiving a money judgment and actually receiving the money were different matters. After withholding tenants’ security deposits, landlords had limited recourse when it came to collecting. Sherrena could try to garnish wages, but this was possible only for former tenants who were employed and living above the poverty line. She could garnish bank accounts. But many of her former tenants did not have bank accounts, and even if they did, state benefits and the first $1,000 were off limits.

Even so, Sherrena and many other landlords filed for second and third causes. This carried consequences for tenants, since money judgments were listed on eviction records. An eviction record listing $200 of rental debt left a different impression than one listing $2,000. Money judgments could also suddenly reappear in tenants’ lives several years after the eviction, particularly if landlords docketed them. Docketing a judgment slapped it on a tenant’s credit report. If the tenant came to own any property in Milwaukee County in the next decade, the docketed judgment placed a lien on that property, severely limiting a new homeowner’s ability to refinance or sell. To landlords, docketing a judgment was a long-odds bet on a tenant’s future. Who knows, maybe somewhere down the line a tenant would want to get her credit in order and would approach her old landlord, asking to repay the debt. “Debt with interest,” the landlord could respond, since money judgments accrued interest at an annual rate that would be the envy of any financial portfolio: 12 percent.”

“Half the time, the tenants weren’t home. Some moved out before the sheriffs arrived. Others didn’t realize their day had come. A rarefied bunch called the Sheriff’s Office, asking if their address was on that day’s eviction list. But many were unprepared and bewildered when the sheriff came knocking. Some claimed never to have received notice or pointed out, accurately, that the notice did not announce a date or even a range of dates when the eviction would take place.”

“The woman walked in circles, trying to think of where to begin. She told one of the deputies that she knew she was being foreclosed but that she didn’t know when they were coming. Her attorney had told her that it could be a day, five days, a week, three weeks; she decided to ride it out. She and her three children had been in the house for five years. The year before, she had been talked into refinancing with a subprime loan. Her payments kept going up, jumping from $920 to $1,250 a month, and her hours at Potawatomi Casino were cut back after her maternity leave.

Hispanic and African American neighborhoods had been targeted by the subprime lending industry: renters were lured into buying bad mortgages, and homeowners were encouraged to refinance under riskier terms. Then it all came crashing down. Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11 percent reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31 percent of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent.

As the woman rushed away to frantically call people to come over and help, the movers exchanged tired glances and whispered curses. They hated doing a full house toward the end of the day but that was precisely what they had on their hands. A mover started in on a girl’s bedroom, painted pink with a sign on the door announcing THE PRINCESS SLEEPS HERE. Another took on the disheveled office, packing Resumes for Dummies into a box with a chalkboard counting down the remaining days of school. The eldest child, a seventh-grade boy, tried to help by taking out the trash. His younger sister, the princess, held her two-year-old sister’s hand on the porch. Upstairs, the movers were trying not to step on the toddler’s toys, which when kicked would protest with beeping sounds and flashing lights.

As the move went on, the woman slowed down. At first, she had borne down on the emergency with focus and energy, almost running through the house with one hand grabbing something and the other holding up the phone. Now she was wandering through the halls aimlessly, almost drunkenly. Her face had that look. The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours. It was something like denial giving way to the surrealism of the scene: the speed and violence of it all; sheriffs leaning against your wall, hands resting on holsters; all these strangers, these sweating men, piling your things outside, drinking water from your sink poured into your cups, using your bathroom. It was the look of being undone by a wave of questions. What do I need for tonight, for this week? Who should I call? Where is the medication? Where will we go? It was the face of a mother who climbs out of the cellar to find the tornado has leveled the house.”

“Landlords showed considerable discretion over whether to move forward with an eviction, extending leniency to some and withdrawing it from others. How a tenant responded to an eviction notice could make the difference. Women tended not to negotiate their eviction like men did, and they were more likely to avoid landlords when they fell behind. These responses did not serve them well.”

“Like many women in her situation, Larraine was ducking and dodging Tobin and Lenny. She never once told them, or even Office Susie, how she was planning on getting caught up. She never asked for a little more time. Meanwhile, Larraine’s neighbor, biker Jerry Warren, confronted Tobin and Lenny immediately, balling up his eviction notice and threatening to wreck Lenny’s face. Belligerent as it was, Jerry’s confrontational response aligned with Tobin’s blunt and brusque way. Property management was a profession dominated by men and by a gruff, masculine way of doing business. That put men like Jerry at an advantage.

Not only did Jerry confront Tobin immediately after being served, but he later offered to pick up litter and repair some trailers if Tobin cleared his debt. Jerry had done some work for Tobin in the past, painting trailer hitches and winterizing pipes. Having proved himself a reliable hand, he had established a “working off the rent” option should money run thin. Larraine rang up social services and begged family members. Jerry went straight to the man who had initiated the eviction. And it worked — Tobin later dismissed his eviction. Larraine’s plan could work only if a local nonprofit organization, her family, or her church came through.

Men often avoided eviction by laying concrete, patching roofs, or painting rooms for landlords. But women almost never approached their landlord with a similar offer. Some women — already taxed by child care, welfare requirements, or work obligations could not spare the time. But many others simply did not conceive of working off the rent as a possibility. When women did approach their landlords with such an offer, it sometimes involved trading sex for rent.”

“Like many inner-city landlords, Sherrena and Quentin tried to limit the number of appliances in their units. If you didn i’t include a stove or refrigerator, you didn’t have to fix it when it broke.”

“For each metropolitan area, the Department of Housing and Urban Development sets a Fair Market Rent (FMR): the most a landlord could charge a family in possession of a federal housing voucher. FMRs were calculated at the municipal level, which often included near and outlying suburbs. This meant that both distressed and exclusive neighborhoods were thrown into the equation. New York City’s FM calculation included SoHo and the South Bronx. Chicago’s included the Gold Coast and the South Side ghetto. This was by design, so that a family could take their voucher and find housing in safe and prosperous areas in the city or its surrounding suburbs. But the program did not bring about large gains in racial or economic integration. Voucher holders more or less stayed put, upgrading to slightly nicer trailer parks or moving to quieter ghetto streets. It could, however, bring about large gains for landlords.

Because rents were higher in the suburbs than in the inner city, the FMR exceeded market rent in disadvantaged neighborhoods. When voucher holders lived in those neighborhoods, landlords could charge them more than what the apartment would fetch on the private market. In 2009, the year Ladona was hoping to move into Sherrena’s new property, the FMR for a four-bedroom unit in Milwaukee County was $1,089. But the average four-bedroom apartment in the city rented for much less: $665. When landlords were allowed to charge more, they did. Although Sherrena didn’t think the Housing Authority would approve the maximum amount, she was planning on charging Ladona $775 a month, $100 more than the average rent for similar units but still well below the FMR limit. Ladona didn’t mind. With a voucher, what she paid was a function of her income, not Sherrena’s rent. Her rental expense wasn’t affected; the taxpayers’ bill was.

In Milwaukee, renters with housing vouchers were charged an average of $55 more each month, compared to unassisted renters who lived in similar apartments in similar neighborhoods. Overcharging voucher holders cost taxpayers an additional $3.6 million each year in Milwaukee alone — the equivalent of supplying 588 more needy families with housing assistance.

The idea of a “rent certificate program” was first proposed in the 1930s, not by some Washington bureaucrat or tenants’ union representative but by the National Association of Real Estate Boards. That group would later change its name to the National Association of Realtors and become the largest trade association for real estate agents, with more than a million members. A rent certificate program would be superior to public housing, they argued. Landlords and Realtors saw government-built and managed buildings offered at cut-rate rents as a direct threat to their legitimacy and bottom line. At first, federal policymakers disagreed and at midcentury decided to fund the construction of massive public housing complexes. But real estate interests kept lobbying for vouchers and were joined by numerous other groups of various political persuasions, including civil rights activists who thought vouchers would advance racial integration. Eventually, after America’s public housing experiment was defunded and declared a failure (in that order), they would have their day.

As housing projects were demolished, the voucher program grew into the nation’s largest housing subsidy program for low-income families. In policy circles, vouchers were known as a “public-private partnership.” In real estate circles, they were known as “a win.”

“The same thing that made homeownership a bad investment in poor, black neighborhoods depressed property values — made landlording there a potentially lucrative one. Property values for similar homes were double or triple in white, middle-class sections of the city; but rents in those neighborhoods were not. A landlord might have been able to fetch $750 for a two-bedroom unit in the suburb of Wauwatosa and only $550 for a similar unit in Milwaukee’s poverty-stricken 53206 zip code. But the Wauwatosa property would have come with a much higher mortgage payment and tax bill, not to mention higher standards.”

“Large-scale social transformations — the crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them — had frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit “kin dependence” by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.

The family was no longer a reliable source of support for poor people. Middle-class kin often did not know how to help or did not want to. And poor kin were often too poor or troubled or addicted to lend much of a hand. Legal entanglements got in the way too. This was why Crystal believed her aunt Rhoda refused to open her door to her after she aged out of foster care. Rhoda had caught a case for her son, his dope found in her apartment, and was serving two years on probation. This meant that law enforcement officers could inspect her apartment. Knowing this, Crystal asked if she could sleep outside on her porch. Rhoda said no.

It was next to impossible for people to survive deep poverty on their own. If you could not rely on your family, you could reach out to strangers, make disposable ties. But it was a lot to ask of someone you barely knew.”

“”And when I pay, can I go look at my stuff?” Larraine asked.

“No. This is a bonded storage, ma am. I can’t let you back there.’ Rifling through your things and pulling out, say, winter clothing was not allowed.””

“Trailer park residents rarely raised a fuss about a neighbor’s eviction, whether that person was a known drug addict or not. Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They “helped get rid of the riffraff,” some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.

In years past, renters opposed landlords and saw themselves as a “class” with shared interests and a unified purpose. During the early twentieth century, tenants organized against evictions and unsanitary conditions. When landlords raised rents too often or too steeply, tenants went so far as to stage rent strikes. Strikers joined together to withhold rent and form picket lines, risking eviction, arrest, and beatings by hired thugs. They were not an especially radical bunch, these strikers. Most were ordinary mothers and fathers who believed landlords were entitled to modest rent increases and fair profits, but not “price gouging.” In New York City, the great rent wars of the Roaring Twenties forced a state legislature to impose rent controls that remain the country’s strongest to this day.”

“Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them — which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do During rent strikes, tenants believed they had a moral obligation to one another. If tenants resisted excessive rent hikes or unwarranted evictions, it was because they invested in their homes and neighborhoods. They felt they belonged there. In the trailer park, that sentiment was almost dead. For most residents, Scott among them, the goal was to leave, not to plant roots and change things. Some residents described themselves as “just passing through,” even if they had been passing through nearly all their life. One, an out-of-work father of three who powered his trailer with stolen electricity, said, “We don’t let family come here. It’s not us. It’s lower-class living, and I didn’t come from this.” Lenny’s ex-wife, who being Lenny’s ex-wife, was virtually married to the trailer park at one time, liked to tell people, “You forget that I’m the one that used to go to the opera.”

“Scott didn’t go back to Iowa. Instead, he decided to go to rehab. On the morning he planned to check himself in, Scott woke up while it was still dark, trimmed his beard, and tucked in his T-shirt. He wanted to climb back out. He felt nervous but ready.

When Scott stepped out of the elevator at seven a.m., an hour before the clinic’s doors opened, he saw that he was late. Fifteen people were already in line.

At 8:10 a.m., a woman wearing gold earrings and a silk blouse opened the door and announced that they could take five people today. A man emerged with a clipboard. “Number 1. Number 2,” he began counting. The line stood and tightened. Scott stepped toward the elevator and pushed the Down button. He could have tried again the next day, but he went on a three-day bender instead.”

“In the last decades of the twentieth century, as the justice system was adopting a set of abrasive policies that would swell police forces and fuel the prison boom, it was also leaving more and more policing responsibilities to citizens without a badge and a gun. What about the pawnshop owner who sold the gun? Isn’t he partially responsible for the homicide? Or the absentee landlord who failed to screen his tenants? Didn’t he play a role in creating the drug house? The police and courts increasingly answered “yes.” It was in this context that the nuisance property ordinance was born, allowing police departments to penalize landlords for the behavior of their tenants. Most properties were designated “nuisances” because an excessive number of 911 calls were made within a certain timeframe. In Milwaukee, the threshold was three or more calls within a thirty-day period. The ordinances pushed property owners to “abate the nuisance” or face fines, license revocation, property forfeiture, or even incarceration. Proponents argued that these new laws would save money and conserve valuable resources by enabling police departments to direct manpower to high-priority crimes.”

“Most nuisance citations were addressed to properties on the North Side. In white neighborhoods, only 1 in 41 properties that could have received a nuisance citation actually did receive one. In black neighborhoods, 1 in 16 eligible properties received a citation. A woman reporting domestic violence was far more likely to land her landlord a nuisance citation if she lived in the inner city.

In the vast majority of cases (83 percent), landlords who received a nuisance citation for domestic violence responded by either evicting the tenants or by threatening to evict them for future police calls. Sometimes, this meant evicting a couple, but most of the time landlords evicted women abused by men who did not live with them.”

“Another wrote: “First, we are evicting Sheila M, the caller for help from policez She has been beaten by her ‘man’ who kicks in doors and goes to jail for 1 or 2 days. (Catch and release does not work) We suggested she obtain a gun and kill him in self defense, but evidently she hasn’t. Therefore, we are evicting her.”

Each of these landlords received the same form letter from the Milwaukee PD: “This notice serves to inform you that your written course of action is accepted.”

The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. After the numbers were released, Milwaukee’s chief of police appeared on the local news and puzzled over the fact that many victims had never contacted the police for help. A nightly news reporter summed up the chief’s views: “He believes that if police were contacted more often, that victims would have the tools to prevent fatal situations from occurring in the future.””

“The following day, Sherrena heard from the fire inspector. He said the fire had started when one of Kamala’s daughters climbed out of bed and knocked over a lamp. Kamala’s father had either fled without grabbing the baby or, more likely, left the girls alone earlier in the evening. Both Kamala and Luke had tried to rescue the child, but the fire was all-consuming. Kamal’s other two daughters walked out themselves, before the fire got out of control. Nobody had heard a smoke detector go off.

The fire inspector told Sherrena she “didn’t have anything to worry about.” She wasn’t liable for anything that had happened. Sherrena then asked if she was obligated to return Kamala’s and Lamar’s rent, since the fire happened a few days after the first of the month. The fire inspector said no, and that settled it in Sherrena’s mind. “They are not getting any money back from me,” she said. Sherrena figured both Kamala and Lamar would ask for their rent to be returned, and she was right.

Sherrena planned to tear the place down and pocket the insurance payout. “The only positive thing I can say is happening out of all of this is that I may get a huge chunk of money,” she said That — and “getting rid of Lamar.” The Red Cross would find Lamar and his sons a new place to live, giving Sherrena one less eviction to worry about.”

“To Larraine, putting something on layaway was saving. “I can’t leave money in my bank,” she said. “When you’re on SSI you can only have so much money in the bank, and it’s got to be less than a thousand dollars. Because if it’s more… they cut your payments until that money is spent.” Larraine was talking about SSI’s resource limit.” She was allowed to have up to $2,000 in the bank, not $1,000 like she thought, but anything more than that could result in her losing benefits. Larraine saw this rule as a clear disincentive to save. “If I can’t keep my money in the bank, then I might as well buy something worthwhile…because I know once I pay on it, it’s mine, and no one can take it from me, just like my jewelry.”

“To Sammy, Pastor Daryl, and others, Larraine was poor because she threw money away. But the reverse was more true. Larraine threw money away because she was poor.

Before she was evicted, Larraine had $164 left over after paying the rent. She could have put some of that away, shunning cable and Walmart. If Larraine somehow managed to save $50 a month, nearly one-third of her after-rent income, by the end of the year she would have $600 to show for it — enough to cover a single month’s rent. And that would have come at considerable sacrifice, since she would sometimes have had to forgo things like hot water and clothes. Larraine could have at least saved what she spent on cable. But to an older woman who lived in a trailer park isolated from the rest of the city, who had no car, who didn’t know how to use the Internet, who only sometimes had a phone, who no longer worked, and who sometimes was seized with fibromyalgia attacks and cluster migraines cable was a valued friend.

People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They might buy lobster on food stamps.

If Larraine spent her money unwisely, it was not because her benefits left her with so much but because they left her with so little. She paid the price for her lobster dinner. She had to eat pantry food the rest of the month. Some days, she simply went hungry. It was worth it. “I’m satisfied with what I had,” she said. “And I’m willing to eat noodles for the rest of the month because of it.””

“Politicians had learned that their constituents hated the idea of senior housing a lot less than public housing for poor families. Grandma and Grandpa made for a much more sympathetic case, and elderly housing provided adult children with an alternative to nursing homes. When public housing construction for low-income households ceased, it continued for the aged; and high-rises originally built for families were converted for elderly use.”

“Ned lost his part-time construction job. He was fired for the two days of work he missed when helping his family move from the trailer park. Job loss could lead to eviction, but the reverse was also true. An eviction not only consumed renters’ time, causing them to miss work, it also weighed heavily on their minds, often triggering mistakes on the job. It overwhelmed workers with stress, leading them to act unprofessionally, and commonly resulted in their relocating farther away from their worksite, increasing their likelihood of being late or missing days.”

“Children caused landlords headache. Fearing street violence, many parents in crime-ridden neighborhoods kept their children locked inside. Children cooped up in small apartments used the curtains for superhero capes; flushed toys down the toilet; and drove up the water bill. They could test positive for lead poisoning, which could bring a pricey abatement order. They could come under the supervision of Child Protective Services, whose caseworkers inspected families’ apartments for unsanitary or dangerous code violations. Teenagers could attract the attention of the police.

It was an old tradition: landlords barring children from their properties. In the competitive postwar housing market of the late 1940s, landlords regularly turned away families with children and evicted tenants who got pregnant.”

“When Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, it did not consider families with children a protected class, allowing landlords to continue openly turning them away or evicting them. Some placed costly restrictions on large families, charging “children-damage deposits” in addition to standard rental fees. One Washington, DC, development required tenants with no children to put down a $150 security deposit but charged families with children a $450 deposit plus a monthly surcharge of $50 per child. In 1980, HUD commissioned a nationwide study to assess the magnitude of the problem and found that only 1 in 4 rental units was available to families without restrictions. Eight years later, Congress finally outlawed housing discrimination against children and families, but as Pam found out, the practice remained widespread. Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.”

“The likelihood of being laid off is roughly 15 percent higher for workers who have experienced an eviction. If housing instability leads to employment instability, it is because the stress and consuming nature of being forced from your home wreak havoc on people’s work performance. Often, evicted families also lose the opportunity to benefit from public housing because Housing Authorities count evictions and unpaid debt as strikes when reviewing applications. And so people who have the greatest need for housing assistance — the rent-burdened and evicted — are systematically denied it.

This — the loss of your possessions, job, home, and access to government aid helps explain why eviction has such a pronounced effect on what social scientists call “material hardship,” a measure of the texture of scarcity. Material hardship assesses, say, whether families experience hunger or sickness because food or medical care is financially out of reach or go without heat, electricity, or a phone because they can’t afford those things. The year after eviction, families experience 20 percent higher levels of material hardship than similar families who were not evicted. They go without food. They endure illness and cold. Evicted families continue to have higher levels of material hardship at least two years after the event.”

“Milwaukee neighborhoods with high eviction rates have higher violent crime rates the following year, even after controlling for past crime rates and other relevant factors.”

“Among Milwaukee renters, over 1 in 5 black women report having been evicted in their adult life, compared with 1 in 12 Hispanic women and 1 in 15 white women.”

Conclusion

“In the middle part of the twentieth century, housing was at the forefront of the progressive agenda. High-rise housing projects were erected to replace slums, sometimes in a single, massive sweep. Cutting the ribbon for a new public housing project was an occasion to celebrate,” the late housing economist Louis Winnick remembered. “Big-city mayors and aldermen trolled for votes by pledging a towering public housing project for the ward.” When public housing residents saw their apartments — all airy and new, nested in complexes surrounded by expansive grassy fields and playgrounds — they were thrilled. “It is a very beautiful place,” one said, “like a big hotel resort.”

But soon the great towers erected to replace slums became slums themselves. After politicians choked off funding, public housing fell into a miserable state of disrepair. Broken windows, plumbing, and elevators stayed that way; outside, sewer openings were left uncovered and trash piled up. Families who could move did, leaving behind the city’s poorest residents. Soon, public housing complexes descended into chaos and violence. It got to the point where the police refused to go to St. Louis’s PruittIgoe Towers, which would be demolished in front of a televised audience only eighteen years after the first residents moved in.”

“Today, the federally funded Housing Choice Voucher Program helps families secure decent housing units in the private rental market. Serving over 2.1 million households, this program has become the largest housing subsidy program for low income families in the United States. An additional 1.2 million families live in public housing. Cities such as Philadelphia, Seattle, and Oakland have reimagined public housing, often as low-rise, attractive buildings dispersed over several neighborhoods. By and large, both public housing residents and voucher holders pay only 30 percent of their income on rent, with government funds covering the remaining costs.”

“In 2013, 1 percent of poor renters lived in rent-controlled units; 15 percent lived in public housing; and 17 percent received a government subsidy, mainly in the form of a rent-reducing voucher. The remaining 67 percent of every 3 poor renting families received no federal assistance. This drastic shortfall in government support, coupled with rising rent and utility costs alongside stagnant incomes, is the reason why most poor renting families today spend most of their income on housing.”

“Legal aid to the poor has been steadily diminishing since the Reagan years and was decimated during the Great Recession. The result is that in many housing courts around the country, 90 percent of landlords are represented by attorneys, and 90 percent of tenants are not. Low-income families on the edge of eviction have no right to counsel. But when tenants have lawyers, their chances of keeping their homes increase dramatically. Establishing publicly funded legal services for low income families in housing court would be a cost-effective measure that would prevent homelessness, decrease evictions, and give poor families a fair shake.

In the 1963 landmark case Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court unanimously established the right to counsel for indigent defendants in criminal cases on the grounds that a fair trial was possible without a lawyer. Eighteen years later, the court heard the case of Abby Gail Lassiter, a poor black North Carolinian, who appeared without counsel at a civil trial that resulted in her parental rights being terminated. This time, a divided court ruled that defendants had a right to counsel only when they risked losing their physical liberty. Incarceration is a misery, but the outcomes of civil cases also can be devastating. Just ask Ms. Lassiter.

Good lawyers would raise defenses tenants often don’t, because they either are unaware of them or, like Arleen, are too nervous and intimidated to mount a strong argument. They would curb frivolous evictions and unchecked abuses and help prevent tenants from signing bad stipulations. If it weren’t so easy to evict someone, tenants like Doreen and Patrice could report dangerous or illegal conditions without fearing retaliation. If tenants had lawyers, they wouldn’t need to go to court. They could go to work or stay home with their children while their attorney made their case. And their case would actually be made.

Courts have shown little interest in addressing the fact that the majority of tenants facing eviction never show up. If anything, they have come to depend on this because each day brings a pile of eviction cases, and the goal of every person working in housing court, no matter where their sympathies lie, is just to get through the pile because the next day another pile will be there waiting. The principle of due process has been replaced by mere process: pushing cases through. Tenant lawyers would change that.”

“Directing aid upstream in the form of a few hours of legal services could lower costs downstream. For example, a program that ran from 2005 to 2008 in the South Bronx provided more than 1,300 families with legal assistance and prevented eviction in 86 percent of cases. It cost around $450,000, but saved New York City more than $700,000 in estimated shelter costs alone. The consequences of eviction are many and so are its burdens on the public purse.

The right to counsel in civil matters has been established around the world; not just in France and Sweden but also in Azerbaijan, India, Zambia, and many other countries we like to think of as less progressive than our own. If America extended the right to counsel in housing court, it would be a major step on the path to a more fair and equitable society. But it would not address the underlying source of America’s eviction epidemic: the rapidly shrinking supply of affordable housing.”

“There are losers and winners. There are losers because there are winners. “Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.”

Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate. It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets. Boosting poor people’s incomes by increasing the minimum wage or public benefits, say, is absolutely crucial.

But not all of those extra dollars will stay in the pockets of the poor. Wage hikes are tempered if rents rise along with them, just as food stamps are worth less if groceries in the inner city cost more and they do, as much as 40 percent more, by one estimate. Poverty is two-faced a matter of income and expenses, input and output and in a world of exploitation, it will not be effectively ameliorated if we ignore this plain fact.

History testifies to this point. When the American labor movement rose up in the 1830s to demand higher wages, landed capital did not lock arms with industrial capital. Instead landlords rooted for the workers because higher wages would allow them to collect higher rents. History repeated itself 100 years later, when wage gains that workers had made through labor strikes were quickly absorbed by rising rents. In the interwar years, the industrial job market expanded, but the housing market, especially for blacks, did not, allowing landlords to recoup workers’ income gains.

Today, if evictions are lowest each February, it is because many members of the city’s working poor dedicate some or all of their Earned Income Tax Credit to pay back rent. In many cases, this annual benefit is as much a boost to landlords as to low-income working families. In fixating almost exclusively on what poor people and their communities lack good jobs, a strong safety net, role models we have neglected the critical ways that exploitation contributes to the persistence of poverty. We have overlooked a fact that landlords never have: there is a lot of money to be made off the poor.’ The ‘hood is good.’”

“Those who profit from the current situation — and those indifferent to it — will say that the housing market should be left alone to regulate itself. They don’t really mean that. Exploitation within the housing market relies on government support. It is the government that legitimizes and defends landlords’ right to charge as much as they want; that subsidizes the construction of high-end apartments, bidding up rents and leaving the poor with even fewer options; that pays landlords when a family cannot, through onetime or ongoing housing assistance; that forcibly removes a family at landlords’ request by dispatching armed law enforcement officers; and that records and publicizes evictions, as a service to landlords and debt collection agencies. Just as the police and the prison have worked to triage the ill effects of rising joblessness in the inner city (like social unrest or the growth of the underground economy), civil courts, sheriff deputies, and homeless shelters manage the fallout of rising housing costs among the urban poor and the privatization of the low-income housing market.”

“Their fates are bound and their interests opposed. If the profits of urban landlords were modest, that would be one thing. But often they are not. The annual income of the landlord of perhaps the worst trailer park in the fourth-poorest city in America is 30 times that of his tenants working full-time for minimum wage and 55 times the annual income of his tenants receiving welfare or SSI. There are two freedoms at odds with each other: the freedom to profit from rents and the freedom to live in a safe and affordable home.”

“The idea is simple. Every family below a certain income level would be eligible for a housing voucher. They could use that voucher to live anywhere they wanted, just as families can use food stamps to buy groceries virtually anywhere, as long as their housing was neither too expensive, big, and luxurious nor too shabby and run-down. Their home would need to be decent, modest, and fairly priced. Program administrators could develop fine-grained analyses, borrowing from algorithms and other tools commonly used in the private market, to prevent landlords from charging too much and families from selecting more housing than they need. The family would dedicate 30 percent of their income to housing costs, with the voucher paying the rest.

A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country. Evictions would plummet and become rare occurrences. Homelessness would almost disappear. Families would immediately feel the income gains and be able to buy enough food, invest in themselves and their children through schooling or job training, and start modest savings. They would find stability and have a sense of ownership over their home and community.

Universal housing programs have been successfully implemented all over the developed world. In countries that have such programs, every single family with an income below a certain level who meets basic program requirements has a right to housing assistance. Great Britain’s Housing Benefit is available to so many households that a journalist recently reporting on the program asked, “Perhaps it is easier to say who does not get it?” “Indeed,” came the answer. This benefit, transferred directly to landlords in most cases, ensures that paying rent does not plunge a family into poverty. The Netherlands’ Housing Allowance operates in a similar way and helps provide good homes to nearly one-third of all its tenants. It has been remarkably successful at housing the country’s poorest citizens.”

“Landlords in most states are not obligated to accept families with housing vouchers, and many don’t because they shun extra building-code mandates or the administrative hassle. A universal voucher program would take their concerns seriously. Some building codes are critical to maintaining safe and decent housing; others are far less so. Enforcing a strict building code in apartments where voucher holders live can be an unnecessary burden on landlords and drive up costs. But even if code enforcement and program administration were made much more reasonable and landlord-friendly, some property owners — particularly those operating in prosperous areas — would still turn away voucher holders. They simply don’t want to house “those people.” If we continue to permit this kind of discrimination, we consign voucher holders to certain landlords who own property in certain neighborhoods. Doing so denies low-income families the opportunity to move into economically healthy and safe neighborhoods and hobbles our ability to promote integration through social policy. Accordingly, a universal voucher program would not only strive to make participation attractive to landlords, it would also mandate participation. Just as we have outlawed discrimination on the basis of race or religion, discrimination against voucher holders would be illegal under a universal voucher program.

A well-designed program would ensure a reasonable rent that rose at the rate of inflation and include flexible provisions allowing landlords to receive a modest rate of return. It would also provide them with steadier rental income, less turnover, and fewer evictions.”

“Making a universal housing program as efficient as possible would require regulating costs. Expanding housing vouchers without stabilizing rent would be asking taxpayers to subsidize landlords’ profits. Today, landlords overcharge voucher holders simply because they can. In distressed neighborhoods, where voucher holders tend to live, market rent is lower than what landlords are allowed to charge voucher holders, according to metropolitan-wide rent ceilings set by program administrators. So the Housing Choice Voucher Program likely costs not millions but billions of dollars more than it should, resulting in the unnecessary denial of help to hundreds of thousands of families. In fact, economists have argued that the current housing voucher program could be expanded to serve all poor families in America without additional spending if we prevented overcharging and made the program more efficient.”

“We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion.

Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes.”