Evicted (34 page)

I tried to ignore this problem, wanting to spend all my time with landlords and tenants on the ground. But when my questions didn't go away, I set out to gather the data myself. I began by designing a survey of tenants in Milwaukee's private housing sector. The survey began small, but with the support of the MacArthur Foundation it grew into something more. I called it the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, MARS for short. From 2009 to 2011, roughly 1,100 tenants were interviewed in their homes by professional interviewers trained and supervised by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, which reported to me. To facilitate estimates generalizable to Milwaukee's entire rental population, households from across the city were interviewed. Clipboards and portable Lenovo ThinkPad computers in hand, interviewers ventured into some of the city's worst neighborhoods. One was bitten by a dog and, later, mugged.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of the Survey Center, MARS had an extraordinarily high response rate for a survey of such a highly mobile and poor population (84 percent). What I was learning during my fieldwork deeply informed MARS's 250 questions: not only what I asked but how I asked it. For example, when I was living in the trailer park, I learned that asking why someone moved was no simple task. Tenants often provided an explanation for a move that maximized their own volition. And asking about involuntary mobility, for its part, came with its own set of complications, as tenants tended to have strict conceptions of eviction. Take Rose and Tim, my neighbors in the trailer park. Rose and Tim were forced to leave their trailer after Tim sustained a back injury at work. They did not go to court but undeniably were evicted. (Their names appear in the eviction records.) Nevertheless, they didn't see things this way. “When you say ‘eviction,' ” Rose explained, “I think of the sheriffs coming and throwing you out and changing your locks, and Eagle Movers tosses your stuff on the curb. That's an eviction. We were
not
evicted.” If Rose and Tim had been asked during a survey, “Have you ever been evicted?,” they would have answered no. Accordingly, surveys that have posed this question vastly underestimate the prevalence of involuntary removal from housing. I learned to ask the question differently, in light of tenants' understanding of the matter, and designed the survey accordingly.

MARS collected new data on housing, residential mobility, eviction, and urban poverty. These data provide the only comprehensive estimate of the frequency of involuntary displacement from housing among urban renters. When I ran the numbers, I was shocked to discover that 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.

The survey also showed that 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.
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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. This means that estimates that do not account for informal evictions downplay the crisis in our cities. If public attention and resources are a product of how widespread policymakers think a problem is, then studies that produce artificially low eviction rates are not just wrong; they're harmful.

Some of the most important findings to come out of the Milwaukee Area Renters Study have to do with eviction's fallout. The data linked eviction to heightened residential instability, substandard housing, declines in neighborhood quality, and even job loss. These findings led me to analyze the consequences of eviction in a national-representative data set (the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study), which showed that evicted mothers suffer from increased material hardship as well as poor physical and mental health.

The prevalence of informal eviction notwithstanding, you can still learn something from eviction court records. They provide an accurate measure of the frequency and location of formal evictions in the city. So I extracted records for all eviction cases that took place in Milwaukee between 2003 and 2013, hundreds of thousands of them. According to these official records, 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.
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Last, I designed another survey that would help me understand why certain people escaped eviction while others did not. The Milwaukee Eviction Court Study was an in-person survey of 250 tenants appearing in eviction court over a six-week period in January and February 2011 (66 percent response rate). These interviews, conducted immediately after tenants' court hearings, provided a snapshot into Milwaukee's evicted population. The data show that 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.
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The multiple methods and different data sources used in this book informed one another in important ways. I began this project with a set of questions to pursue, but lines of inquiry flexed and waned as my fieldwork progressed. Some would not have sprung to mind had I never set foot in the field. But it was only after analyzing court records and survey data that I was able to see the bigger picture, grasping the magnitude of eviction in poor neighborhoods, identifying disparities, and cataloguing consequences of displacement. My quantitative endeavors also allowed me to assess how representative my observations were. Whenever possible, I subjected my ground-level observations to a kind of statistical check, which determined whether what I was seeing on the ground was also detectable within a larger population. When an idea was clarified or refined by aggregate comparisons, I would return to my field notes to identify the mechanisms behind the numbers. Working in concert with one another, each method enriched the others. And each kept the others honest.

In addition to the larger endeavors—conducting original surveys and analyzing big data from court records—I also sought out a wide variety of evidence to bolster the validity of my observations and deepen my understanding of the issues. I analyzed two years' worth of nuisance property citations from the Milwaukee Police Department; obtained records of more than a million 911 calls in Milwaukee; and collected rent rolls, legal transcripts, public property records, school files, and psychological evaluations.

Together, these combined data sources provide a new portrait of the powerful ways 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. I have made all survey data publicly available through the Harvard Dataverse Network.
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This book is based in Milwaukee. Wisconsin's largest city is not every city, but it is considerably less unique than the small clutch of iconic but exceptional places that have come to represent the American urban experience. Every city creates its own ecosystem, but in some cities this is much more pronounced. Milwaukee is a fairly typical midsize metropolitan area with a fairly typical socioeconomic profile and housing market and fairly typical renter protections.
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It is far better suited to represent the experiences of city dwellers living in Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Baltimore, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Gary, Raleigh, Utica, and other cities left out of the national conversation because they are not America's biggest successes (San Francisco, New York City) or biggest failures (Detroit, Newark).

That said, it is ultimately up to future researchers to determine whether what I found in Milwaukee is true in other places. A thousand questions remain unanswered. We need a robust sociology of housing that reaches beyond a narrow focus on policy and public housing. We need a new sociology of displacement that documents the prevalence, causes, and consequences of eviction. And perhaps most important, we need a committed sociology of inequality that includes a serious study of exploitation and extractive markets.

Still, I wonder sometimes what we are asking when we ask if findings apply elsewhere. Is it that we really believe that something could happen in Pittsburgh but never in Albuquerque, in Memphis but never in Dubuque? The weight of the evidence is in the other direction, especially when it comes to problems as big and as widespread as urban poverty and unaffordable housing. This study took place in the heart of a major American city, not in an isolated Polish village or a brambly Montana town or on the moon.
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The number of evictions in Milwaukee is equivalent to the number in other cities, and the people summoned to housing court in Milwaukee look a lot like those summoned in Charleston and Brooklyn. Maybe what we are really asking when we ask if a study is “generalizable” is: Can it really be this bad everywhere? Or maybe we're asking: Do I really have to pay attention to this problem?

Ethnography recently has come to be written almost exclusively in the first person. It is a straightforward way of writing and an effective one. If ethnographers want people to take what they say seriously, the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz once observed, they have to convince readers that they have “been there.” “And that,” Geertz said, “persuading us that this offstage miracle has occurred, is where the writing comes in.”
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The first person has become the chosen mule for this task.
I was there. I saw it happen. And because I saw it happen, you can believe it happened.
Ethnographers shrink themselves in the field but enlarge themselves on the page because first-person accounts convey experience—and experience, authority.

But first-person narration is not the only technique available to us.
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In fact, it may be the least well-suited vehicle for capturing the essence of a social world because the “I” filters all. With first-person narration, the subjects and the author are each always held in view, resulting in every observation being trailed by a reaction to the observer. No matter how much care the author takes, the first-person ethnography becomes just as much about the fieldworker as about anything she or he saw. I have sat through countless conversations about a work of ethnography or reportage that have nothing to do with the book's subject matter and everything to do with its author's decisions or mistakes or “ethical character.” And after almost every academic talk I have given on the material in this book, I have been asked questions like: “How did you feel when you saw that?” “How did you gain this sort of access?” These are fine questions, but there is bigger game afoot. There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land. At a time of rampant inequality and widespread hardship, when hunger and homelessness are found throughout America, I am interested in a different, more urgent conversation. “I” don't matter. I hope that when you talk about this book, you talk first about Sherrena and Tobin, Arleen and Jori, Larraine and Scott and Pam, Crystal and Vanetta—and the fact that somewhere in your city, a family has just been evicted from their home, their things piled high on the sidewalk.

There are costs to abandoning the first person. In the context of this study, it meant disguising when I intervened in nontrivial ways. There are two such instances in this book. When a “friend” rented Arleen a U-Haul truck to move from Thirteenth Street and when Vanetta borrowed money from a “friend” to buy a stove and refrigerator in anticipation of a visit from Child Protective Services, that was me. It is also important to recognize that none of the tenants in this book had a car. I did, and I sometimes drove people around when they were looking for housing. When I didn't, people relied on Milwaukee's irregular bus system or set off on foot. It would have taken families much longer to find subsequent housing if they hadn't had access to my car (or phone).

I didn't pay people for interviews or for their time. People asked me for money because they asked everyone for money. I stopped carrying a wallet and learned how to say no like everyone around me did. If I had a few dollars on me, I'd sometimes give it. But as a rule I didn't give out large sums.

In Milwaukee, people bought me food, and I bought them food. People bought me gifts, and I bought them gifts. The Hinkstons once sent me into their basement to see if I couldn't bang the furnace back to life. When I emerged unsuccessful, I found a birthday cake waiting for me. Once, Arleen bought me a tin of cookies and one of those cards that play a silly song. We kept it in my car and would open it when we needed a laugh. Scott still sends my eldest son a birthday card with a ten-dollar bill tucked inside, just like he did when he was homeless.

The harder feat for any fieldworker is not getting in; it's leaving. And the more difficult ethical dilemma is not how to respond when asked to help but how to respond when you are given so much. I have been blessed by countless acts of generosity from the people I met in Milwaukee. Each one reminds me how gracefully they refuse to be reduced to their hardships. Poverty has not prevailed against their deep humanity.