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If You Lose Your Home, You Lose Everything Else, Too

Eviction turns someone's poverty into someone else's profit.

Matthew Desmond，2016. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Crown Publishers.

In his brilliant, heartbreaking book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, American sociologist Matthew Desmond tells the stories of evictions to explain the poverty and profit in American cities based on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data in Milwaukee.

Milwaukee is a fairly typical midsize metropolitan area with a fairly typical socioeconomic profile and housing market and fairly typical renter protections. Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the $20 a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup after her hours are cut. All are spending almost everything they have on rent, and all have fallen behind.

The fates of these families are in the hands of two landlords: Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher turned inner-city entrepreneur, and Tobin Charney, who runs one of the worst trailer parks in Milwaukee. They loathe some of their tenants and are fond of others, but as Sherrena puts it, “Love don’t pay the bills.” She moves to evict Arleen and her boys a few days before Christmas.

In a place like Milwaukee, how prominent is eviction? What are its consequences? Who gets evicted? If poor families are spending so much on housing, what are they going without?

1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced at least one forced move—formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation—in the two years prior to being surveyed.

Nearly half of those forced moves (48 percent) were informal evictions: off-the-books displacements not processed through the court, as when a landlord pays you to leave or hires a couple of heavies to throw you out. Formal eviction was less common, constituting 24 percent of forced moves. An additional 23 percent of forced moves were due to landlord foreclosure, with building condemnations accounting for the remaining 5 percent. In other words, for every eviction executed through the judicial system, there are two others executed beyond the purview of the court, without any form of due process.

According to Eviction court records n Milwaukee between 2003 and 2013, each year almost half of all formal, court-ordered evictions in Milwaukee take place in predominantly black neighborhoods. Within those neighborhoods women are more than twice as likely to be evicted as men.

The median age of a tenant in Milwaukee’s eviction court was thirty-three. The youngest was nineteen; the oldest, sixty-nine. The median monthly household income of tenants in eviction court was $935, and the median amount of back rent owed was about that much. The eviction court survey also showed that much more than rental debt separates the evicted from the almost evicted. When I analyzed these data, I found that even after accounting for how much the tenant owed the landlord—and other factors like household income and race—the presence of children in the household almost tripled a tenant’s odds of receiving an eviction judgment. The effect of living with children on receiving an eviction judgment was equivalent to falling four months behind in rent.

The cause of poverty: lack of stable housing

Existing researches on poverty are not uncommon. Many studies have assumed that poverty is an isolated event, such as only focusing on a single group. But in Desmond’s view, this is actually a misconception. He tends to take the poverty as a relationship, which includes the poor as well as the rich and government workers, etc. And eviction in housing does.

“Poverty was a relationship, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle. Eviction was such a process.”

Unlike previous studies on public housing projects or through housing to look at the level of segregation, the gentrification, Desmond wants to bring the private rental market into public view, dictating the complex mechanism of eviction and difficulties faced by low-income families. He thinks it is essential to study the housing problem of the poor.

Desmond  argues that the dynamics of the private housing market is fundamental to poverty in America: where the vast majority of poor people lived, playing such an imposing and vital role in the lives of the families, consuming most of their income; aggravating their poverty and deprivation; resulting in their eviction, insecurity, and homelessness; dictating where they lived and whom they lived with; and powerfully influencing the character and stability of their neighborhoods.

The private housing sector is shaping the lives of poor American families and their communities. They have shown that problems endemic to poverty—residential instability, severe deprivation, concentrated neighborhood disadvantage, health disparities, even joblessness—stem from the lack of affordable housing in our cities.

Without stable housing, everything falls apart

Low-income families face such a cruel situation every day. Most of them are spending at least 50 % of their income housing costs, and one in four is spending over 70% on rent and utilities. Besides, it's even harder when you try to rent with kids. For example, many landlords refused to rent house to Arleen, just because she is a single mother with two sons. Finally, the cheapest house she could find still took 88% of her income. And at this time, she missed a job interview, which directly led to her eviction.

Evictions come with court record, just like any other court record. They follow you around and they could have consequences. It’s a direct cause of homelessness, school instability for children, and social instability. A lot of landlords view an eviction as a deal breaker. So they refuse to rent to tenants with evictions within the last two or three years. It also affects public housing application. That means if you want to apply for public housing, you have to wait several years until the list unfroze. However, in this waiting process, there are so many uncertainties, such as waiting too long and high fees. It is more likely that the families in urgent need of housing would have been brought down before the government aid come.

Eviction usually leads to two moves, not just one, he explains, as tenants settle for dangerous, degrading housing as a stopgap while seeking a more permanent alternative. Job loss can lead to eviction, but the reverse happens as well, with evictions causing people to miss work, to make more mistakes on the job or to relocate farther away from a workplace.

Another reason why we must reflect deeply on eviction is that poverty will be passed to next generation. Kids have moved with their parents since childhood, and they have taken it as the norm.

Poverty and profit

The other side of poverty is profit. There are real profit margins in low income neighborhoods ins inner city. You can buy property for low, you could have a very low mortgage payment. You can have a low tax payment, but you can rent it at a decent rate. Rents in lower-income areas are not as high as in richer ones, but they’re not too low. So it’s absolutely lucrative. In 2010, a two-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee's poorest neighborhood (over 40% of people living in poverty) was $550 a month, which is just only $50 less than the citywide median. A large number of poor people gather in the central city that ensures the boom of the rental market. One landlord Desmond interviewed said: the hood is good. There is a lot of money to be made there. Thus, even if the low-income families are struggling and tenuous, they are still included in the interest chain, but just playing the role of being exploited.

Not only do the poor offer landlords a generous rent, but they are also plundered by another group when evicted. Some people do nothing but just help with evictions. There are moving companies that collect eviction records and sell those to landlords. There are sheriff’s deputes whose full-time job basically is to execute eviction and foreclose orders. There are court commissioners that work for governments but are not officially constituted. In the process, government agencies, landlords and various companies have formed a mechanism for achieving evictions.

Indeed, Desmond explicitly stated that he wasn’t making moral judgments about the landlord or anyone. The relationship between landlords and tenants is mixed. It is undeniable that there is an extremely unequal phenomenon. A landlord's annual income may exceed $400000, which is more than 35 time a full of low-income family. But this doesn’t mean a sharp and violent confrontation. Landlords simply regard it as a legitimate business, some of them will give a hand to desperate tenants. For the tenant, though clearly aware of the nature of cruel facts, they tend to focus on much more smaller things in daily life, because the immediate livelihood is already troublesome.

What can be done

The widespread eviction in low income people is a denial of basic human rights. Desmond proposes a few solutions. First is about the housing court. It aims to protect tenants’ right to an attorney in civil courts to fight for their interests. Extending free access to public legal service in housing court would be really important and step in the right direction.

In addition, we need to expand the coverage of low-income people with housing vouchers. Housing is a right. If a majority of the poor lack of affordable housing, it is to some extent a departure from the value of freedom. Lots of low-income people like Scott are displaced by all kinds of factors, but they still bravely face the reality and seek help. Sadly at the moment, there is not enough aid to meet the growing need in America.

Stable housing is the only guarantee of stable workforce, which is a necessary human capital investment, community investment and public health construction. Not only that, evictions will inevitably leave deep scars on the next generation, which is why housing must be brought to the center of the poverty debate. It should even be on the top of poverty agenda.

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