Evicted (43 page)

1.
While living with Patricia, Crystal would tell anyone who asked that she was staying with “her mom.” Presumably, she would give survey researchers the same answer. Our current analytical toolkit, even with all the white-coated words of network analysis, is ill equipped to capture the complexity of relationships in which people like Crystal are enveloped. See Nan Lin,
Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mario Small,
Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,”
American Journal of Sociology
117 (2012): 1295–335.

2.
I did not personally witness this incident. I reconstructed the scene after multiple interviews with Crystal.

When tenuous but intense relationships between virtual strangers end badly—or violently, as they sometimes do—they foster deep misgivings between peers and neighbors, eroding community and network stability. The memory of having been used or mistreated by a disposable tie encourages people to be suspicious of others. Relying on disposable ties, then, is both a response to and a source of social instability.

Crystal's cousins and foster sisters were around her age. They could not offer her shelter or much money, but they could fly to her side during a fight.

3.
On the presence of Child Protective Services in the lives of poor black families, see Christopher Wildeman and Natalia Emanuel, “Cumulative Risks of Foster Care Placement by Age 18 for U.S. Children, 2000–2011,”
PLOS ONE
9 (2014): 1–7; Dorothy Roberts,
Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
(New York: Basic Books, 2002).

4.
In 2010, the
New York Times
reported that one in every fifty Americans lives in a household with an income consisting only of food stamps. Jason DeParle, “Living on Nothing but Food Stamps,”
New York Times
, January 2, 2010.

1.
From Scott's disciplinary proceedings in front of the Wisconsin Board of Nursing.

2.
Consequential and costly policy decisions have been made based on the collective assumption that poor people lack connections to kin and friends who are gainfully employed, college educated, and homeowners. Mixed-income housing is intended to “provide low-income residents with exposure to employment opportunities and social role models.” Neighborhood relocation programs, such as Moving to Opportunity, are designed to connect low-income families to more “prosocial and affluent social networks.” But many poor people have plenty of ties to the upwardly mobile. Roughly 1 in 6 Milwaukee renters lives in a neighborhood with above average disadvantage but is embedded in networks with below average disadvantage. But simply having ties to the middle class is insufficient. Likely because of the popularity of the term “social capital,” researchers tend to think of prosocial connections to important or resource-rich people as something you “have” and that, like money, can be used whenever you'd like. In reality, as Scott's experience shows, those connections matter only insofar as you are able to activate them. On social programs designed to combat “social isolation,” see US Department of Housing and Urban Development,
Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program: Final Impacts Evaluation
(Washington, DC: Office of Policy Development and Research, 2011); US Department of Housing and Urban Development,
Mixed-Income Housing and the HOME Program
(Washington, DC: Office of Policy Development and Research, 2003). For canonical theories about poverty and community life holding that spatial isolation (residential ghettoization) brings about social isolation (network ghettoization), see William Julius Wilson,
The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy
, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]); Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton,
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). For a detailed analysis of neighborhood and network disadvantage, see Matthew Desmond and Weihua An, “Neighborhood and Network Disadvantage Among Urban Renters,”
Sociological Science
2 (2015): 329–50.

3.
When he was using, Scott would sometimes call it “self-medicating.” It wasn't just nurse talk. So many words and phrases exist to help cover over the rotten thing festering at the base of the root. How often, I wonder, is coping mistaken for culture?

4.
The psychiatrist asked Scott, “Do you want to go straight to two hundred in Zoloft, or do you want to work up to it?”

“Straight to two hundred,” Scott answered. He didn't think it made sense to drop his dosage, high as it was, since he had been on 200 mgs before.

5.
When methadone made the news, it usually wasn't pretty. The year Scott began his treatment program, methadone accounted for less than 2 percent of opioid pain-reliever prescriptions but almost one-third of the overdose deaths caused by opioid pain relievers. The medical community attributed the troubling rise of methadone-related deaths to the increasing use of the drug to treat pain, not addiction. When it comes to treating heroin addiction and its broader social ramifications, methadone has been highly effective since being introduced in 1964. Known as a full opioid agonist, it feeds an addict's cravings and allows him to function without impairment, if the dose is right. The evidence is consistent. Methadone reduces or eliminates heroin use, lowers overdoses as well as criminality associated with drug use, boosts patients' health, and helps many live full, productive lives. When it comes to heroin addiction, the drug simply outperforms abstinence-only programs like AA. “You hear all these harsh stories about methadone,” one expert said, “but you never hear about the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are taking methadone every day, who work, who have largely conquered their habits and lead normal lives.” Scott was becoming one of those people. Peter Friedmann, quoted in Harold Pollack, “This Drug Could Make a Huge Dent in Heroin Addiction. So Why Isn't It Used More?,”
Washington Post
, November 23, 2013. See also Herman Joseph, Sharon Stancliff, and John Langrod, “Methadone Maintenance Treatment (MMT): A Review of Historical and Clinical Issues,”
Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine
67 (1999): 347–64; Centers for Disease Control, “Vital Signs: Risk for Overdose from Methadone Used for Pain Relief—United States, 1999–2010,”
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
61 (2012): 493–97.

6.
Sally Satel, “Happy Birthday, Methadone!,”
Washington Monthly
, November/December 2014.

1.
This means that to divide the urban poor into two groups, the unstable and the stable, the undeserving and deserving, the decent and street, is often to misrecognize as immutable that which is regularly transitory and tenuous. Stability and instability: these are not fixed states as much as temporary conditions poor families experience for varying periods of time. Problems bleed into each other. The murder of a loved one can lead to depression, which can lead to job loss, which can lead to eviction, which can lead to homelessness, which can intensify one's depression, and so on. Policymakers and their researchers can be prone to aiming a silver bullet at one of these problems. But a shotgun's wide blast might be preferred. On cascades of adversity among low-income families, see Timothy Black,
When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On and Off the Streets
(New York: Vintage, 2009); Matthew Desmond, “Severe Deprivation in America,”
Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences
, forthcoming; Kristin Perkins and Robert Sampson, “Compounded Deprivation in the Transition to Adulthood: The Intersection of Racial and Economic Inequality Among Chicagoans, 1995–2013,”
Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences,
forthcoming
;
Bruce Western, “Lifetimes of Violence in a Sample of Released Prisoners,”
Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences
, forthcoming.

2.
Milwaukee neighborhoods with more children had more evictions, even after accounting for their poverty rate, racial composition, and a number of other things. In neighborhoods where children made up less than 10 percent of the population in 2010, 1 renting household in 123 was evicted. In those where children made up at least 40 percent of the population, 1 household in every 12 was. All else equal, a 1 percent increase in the percentage of children in a neighborhood is predicted to increase a neighborhood's evictions by almost 7 percent. These estimates are based on court-ordered eviction records that took place in Milwaukee County between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2010. The statistical model evaluating the association between a neighborhood's percentage of children and its number of evictions is a zero-inflated Poisson regression, which is described in detail in Matthew Desmond et al., “Evicting Children,”
Social Forces
92 (2013): 303–27.

3.
That misery could stick around. At least two years after their eviction, mothers like Arleen still experienced significantly higher rates of depression than their peers. See Matthew Desmond and Rachel Tolbert Kimbro, “Eviction's Fallout: Housing, Hardship, and Health,”
Social Forces
(2015), in press. See also Marc Fried, “Grieving for a Lost Home,” in
The Urban Condition: People and Policy in the Metropolis
, ed
.
Leonard Duhl (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 151–71; Theresa Osypuk et al., “The Consequences of Foreclosure for Depressive Symptomatology,”
Annals of Epidemiology
22 (2012): 379–87.

4.
Another approach involves surveying a person's resources before trying to access them. Because in poor neighborhoods the most accepted way to say no is to say, “I can't,” people sometimes try to take that option off the table. So, for example, instead of asking, “Can I get a ride?” you ask, “You got gas in your car?” Instead of asking, “Could you make me a plate?” you ask, “You eat?” When someone knows you have gas in your tank or food in your refrigerator, it's harder to give a good reason for turning him or her away. Through everyday interaction, the poor have picked up what political fund-raisers and development officers have spent millions of dollars to discover: that there is a delicate art to “the ask.” Knowing how to ask for help—and, in turn, when to extend or withhold aid—is an essential skill for managing poverty.

Asking social workers for help comes with its own set of rules. You don't want to ask for nothing, because you'll receive nothing in return. But you also don't want to come off as too needy, too hungry, too on the edge—because Child Protective Services might soon pay you a visit. I once met a woman, a thirty-three-year-old mother of two teenage girls, who drank a lot. She attributed her drinking to traumatic events that happened to her as a child. “I remember. Down to the smell.”

“Have you ever seen a counselor?” I asked.

“No. I thought about it. But they get too deep into your business. I had somebody make a false allegation against me with child services in California. They didn't find nothing, but it was traumatizing just the same, having somebody come through my door…and talk to my kids by theyself.”

If she told someone how damaged she was, and how she coped, would she be allowed to keep her children? This mother didn't know and wasn't going to find out.

5.
I did not personally witness this interaction. Arleen told me about it.

1.
Lewis Mumford,
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
(New York: MJF Books, 1961), 13; with special thanks to Rowan Flad and Shamus Khan for etymology insights.

2.
Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
(New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), 511.

3.
Gunnar Myrdal,
An American Dilemma
,
vol. 2,
The Negro Social Structure
(New York: McGraw-Hill Publishers, 1964 [1944]), 810.

4.
Plato,
The Republic
(New York: Penguin Classics, 1987), 312. I have changed “men” to “people.”

5.
Mary Schwartz and Ellen Wilson,
Who Can Afford to Live in a Home? A Look at Data from the 2006 American Community Survey
(Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2007).

6.
Chester Hartman and David Robinson, “Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem,”
Housing Policy Debate
14 (2003): 461–501.

7.
Gary Evans, “The Environment of Childhood Poverty,”
American Psychologist
59 (2004): 77–92; Shigehiro Oishi, “The Psychology of Residential Mobility: Implications for the Self, Social Relationships, and Well-Being,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science
5 (2010): 5–21; Robert Sampson,
Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

8.
In fact, one can detect a thick middle-class bias among researchers who assume that moves are deliberate and planned. For a further explanation of the intentionality bias in residential mobility research, see Matthew Desmond and Tracey Shollenberger, “Forced Displacement from Rental Housing: Prevalence and Neighborhood Consequences,”
Demography
, forthcoming. On high rates of residential mobility among poor families, see David Ihrke and Carol Faber,
Geographical Mobility: 2005 to 2010
(Washington, DC: United States Census Bureau, 2012); Robin Phinney, “Exploring Residential Mobility Among Low-Income Families,”
Social Service Review
87 (2013): 780–815.

9.
This finding comes from a negative binomial model that estimated the number of moves renters undertook in the previous two years, conditioning on household income, race, education, gender, family status, age, criminal record, and three recent life shocks: job loss, relationship dissolution, and eviction. The analysis found that low incomes predicted higher rates of mobility only before controlling for involuntary displacement and that, all else equal, renters who experienced a forced move were expected to have a moving rate 1.3 times greater than those who avoided involuntary displacement. See Matthew Desmond, Carl Gershenson, and Barbara Kiviat, “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters,”
Social Service Review
89 (2015): 227–62. By “Milwaukee's poorest renters,” I mean renting households in the lowest income quartile (with incomes below $12,204). Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.

10.
On Jackson County, Missouri, see Tara Raghuveer, “ ‘We Be Trying': A Multistate Analysis of Eviction and the Affordable Housing Crisis,” B.A. thesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Committee on the Degrees in Social Studies, 2014). In 2012, New York City's Housing Courts processed 28,743 eviction judgments and 217,914 eviction filings for nonpayment. See New York City Rent Guidelines Board,
2013 Income and Affordability Study
, April 4, 2013. Cleveland, a city of approximately 95,702 occupied renter households, saw 11,072 eviction filings in 2012 and 11,031 in 2013—meaning that almost 12 percent of renter households were summoned to eviction court each year. See Northeast Ohio Apartment Association,
Suites
magazine, “Eviction Index,” 2012–2013; American Community Survey, 2013. In 2012, an estimated 32,231 evictions were filed in Chicago, which represents 7 percent of the city's rental inventory; see Kay Cleaves, “Cook Eviction Stats Part 5: Are Eviction Filings Increasing?,”
StrawStickStone.com
, February 8, 2013.

11.
Matthew Desmond and Carl Gershenson, “Housing and Employment Insecurity Among the Working Poor,”
Social Problems
, forthcoming.

12.
Evictions also help to exacerbate the problem most responsible for their rise by driving up rents. This is plain in cases where landlords evict tenants from rent-regulated units so that they may offer apartments at market rates. But it is also true of normal evictions of families from unregulated units because it is easier to raise the rent on new tenants than old ones. In Milwaukee, a tenant annually pays almost $58 less in rent for every year she has lived in an apartment, all else equal. Turnover facilitates rent hikes, and evictions create turnover. Matthew Desmond and Kristin Perkins, “Are Landlords Overcharging Voucher Holders?,” working paper, Harvard University, June 2015. In San Francisco, Ellis Act evictions—often used to convert rent-regulated apartments into condos or market-rate units—increased by 170 percent between March 2010 and February 2013. Marisa Lagos, “San Francisco Evictions Surge, Report Finds,”
San Francisco Gate
, November 5, 2013.

13.
Matthew Desmond and Rachel Tolbert Kimbro, “Eviction's Fallout: Housing, Hardship, and Health,”
Social Forces
(2015), in press.

14.
Desmond et al., “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters.”

15.
Technically, the results of lagged dependent variable regression models showed that experiencing a forced move is associated with a standard deviation increase of more than one-third in both neighborhood poverty and crime rates, relative to voluntary moves. Across all models, the most robust and consistent predictors of neighborhood downgrades between moves are race (whether a renter is African American) and move type (whether the move was forced). Desmond and Shollenberger, “Forced Displacement from Rental Housing.”

16.
Sampson,
Great American City
; Patrick Sharkey,
Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

17.
This finding is documented in a study called “Eviction's Fallout,” coauthored with Rachel Kimbro. In that study, we rely on a dichotomous indicator to measure
depressive symptoms
in mothers. Mothers were asked a series of questions, focused on experiences in the previous twelve months, based on the Composite International Diagnostic Interview Short Form (CIDI-SF). Respondents were asked whether they had feelings of dysphoria (depression) or anhedonia (inability to enjoy what is usually pleasurable) in the past year that lasted for two weeks or more, and if so, whether the symptoms lasted most of the day and occurred every day of the two-week period. If so, they were asked more specific questions about: (a) losing interest, (b) feeling tired, (c) change in weight, (d) trouble sleeping, (e) trouble concentrating, (f) feeling worthless, and (g) thinking about death. Mothers were classified as probable cases of depression if they endorsed either dysphoria or anhedonia plus two of the other symptoms in the follow-up questions (leading to a CIDI-SF MD score of 3 or higher). Results are robust to varying the cut-point for the depression scale as well as to negative binomial models estimating the number of depressive symptoms respondents reported. See Ronald Kessler et al., “Methodological Studies of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) in the US National Comorbidity Survey (NCS),”
International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research
7 (1998): 33–55.

18.
Michael Serby et al., “Eviction as a Risk Factor for Suicide,”
Psychiatric Services
57 (2006): 273–74. Katherine Fowler et al., “Increase in Suicides Associated with Home Eviction and Foreclosure During the US Housing Crisis: Findings from 16 National Violent Death Reporting System States, 2005–2010,”
American Journal of Public Health
105 (2015): 311–16.

19.
Sampson,
Great American City
.

20.
This result draws on neighborhood-level data for Milwaukee, 2005–2007. Using a lagged-response model, I predicted a neighborhood's violent-crime rate for one year, controlling for violent crime and eviction rates the
previous year
as well as for the percentage of families in poverty, of African Americans in the neighborhood, of the population under eighteen years of age, of residents with less than a high school education, and of households receiving housing assistance. The final model documented a significant association between a neighborhood's violent crime rate and its eviction rate the previous year (B = .155; p < .05). See Matthew Desmond, “Do More Evictions Lead to Higher Crime? Neighborhood Consequences of Forced Displacement,” working paper, Harvard University, August 2015.

21.
Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.

22.
United States Conference of Mayors,
Hunger and Homelessness Survey
(Washington, DC: United States Conference of Mayors, 2013); Martha Burt, “Homeless Families, Singles, and Others: Findings from the 1996 National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients,”
Housing Policy Debate
12 (2001): 737–80; Maureen Crane and Anthony Warnes, “Evictions and Prolonged Homelessness,”
Housing Studies
15 (2000): 757–73.

On the effects of substandard housing and unsafe neighborhoods on children's health, see Julie Clark and Ade Kearns, “Housing Improvements, Perceived Housing Quality and Psychosocial Benefits from the Home,”
Housing Studies
27 (2012): 915–39; Tama Leventhal and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, “The Neighborhoods They Live In: The Effects of Neighborhood Residence on Child and Adolescent Outcomes,”
Psychological Bulletin
126 (2000): 309–37.

23.
Joseph Harkness and Sandra Newman, “Housing Affordability and Children's Well-Being: Evidence from the National Survey of America's Families,”
Housing Policy Debate
16 (2005): 223–55; Sandra Newman and Scott Holupka, “Housing Affordability and Investments in Children,”
Journal of Housing Economics
24 (2014): 89–100.

24.
In other markets, when a commodity gets too expensive, people can buy less of it. When the price of oil shoots up, people can drive less. When a sad corn crop scales up the price of beef, people can eat fewer burgers. But when the price of rent and utilities rises, most poor Americans do not have the option of consuming cheaper or smaller housing, because it doesn't exist in their city. According to the 2013 American Housing Survey (Table C-02-RO), roughly 98 percent of renting households below the poverty line live in apartments with at least one bedroom, and 68 percent live in units with two or more bedrooms. In Milwaukee, fully 97 percent of renters live in a one-, two-, or three-bedroom unit. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. Smaller housing units have vanished from the American city. In the 1970s and 1980s more than a million single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel units were regulated out by new building standards or upwardly converted to cater to better-off renters. See Whet Moser, “The Long, Slow Decline of Chicago's SROs,”
Chicago
magazine, June 14, 2013; Brendan O'Flaherty,
Making Room: The Economics of Homelessness
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 142–47; James Wright and Beth Rubin, “Is Homelessness a Housing Problem?,”
Housing Policy Debate
2 (1991): 937–56; Christopher Jencks,
The Homeless
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994)
,
chapter 6.

Besides moving away from their job, friends, family, and community, the only way low-income tenants can shrink their housing is by taking in boarders. But many landlords simply do not allow this. Even if they were to overlook maximum-occupancy regulations, more people in an apartment means more maintenance costs and a higher water bill. The majority of Milwaukee renter households (75 percent) are not responsible for the water bill. For insight into how landlords and property managers think about occupancy and cost in relation to that bill, consider what Joe Parazinski, a white building manager who lived and worked in the inner city, had to say: “If I move in [more] people, all of a sudden now there's ten living there. Well, now that's ten showers a day….Now the toilet, instead of being flushed twenty times a day, it's now being flushed two hundred times. Now, how many more loads are going to be run through the washer machine?…When you start adding that shit up, it's not petty.”

Housing advocates tend to think “doubling up” is a problem, but poor renters tend to think doubling up is a solution—because although overcrowding is not innocent of consequences, the much bigger problem they face is undercrowding, the coerced overconsumption of housing they cannot afford. The majority of poor renting households nationwide are not overcrowded: 24 percent of those households have more than 1.5 persons per bedroom. Only 8 percent of all renter households in Milwaukee have more than two people per bedroom. By this definition of overcrowding—more than two people per bedroom—4 percent of white renters, 8 percent of black renters, and 16 percent of Hispanic renters in Milwaukee live in overcrowded apartments. Almost half of all adult renters in Milwaukee do not live with another adult. African American renters in Milwaukee are particularly isolated when it comes to their living arrangements: only 35 percent live with another adult, compared to 58 percent of white renters and 69 percent of Hispanic renters. Among all Milwaukee renters, 32 percent live alone, 16 percent live only with children, and 53 percent live with another adult. Thirty-nine percent of black renters live alone, compared to 33 percent of white renters and 14 percent of Hispanic renters. Twenty-six percent of black renters live only with children, compared to 9 percent of white renters and 17 percent of Hispanic renters. Some surveyed renters likely failed to disclose other adults living with them, especially if the landlord was unaware of them. In the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study (2011), interviewers asked tenants to list all adults who lived or stayed with them. After explaining how their information would be kept confidential, interviewers told participants: “I'm interested in
all
adults that live or stay with you—even if they are not on the lease and even if your landlord doesn't know about them.” Tenants in eviction court listed 375 co-resident adults, including 70 who were not leaseholders. Black men made up the largest group of adults not listed on the Summons and Complaint (N=32), followed by black women (N=24). My estimate of the percentage of black renters who live alone (or without another adult) is probably somewhat inflated, then; but the point about the prevalence of overcrowding among renters not matching the concern about overcrowding among policymakers and analysts remains. American Housing Survey (2013), Table C-02-RO; Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.