Category: Evicted – Matthew Desmond

Cheap Houses, High Rents

Cheap Houses, High Rents

Posted on by jabittan
Throughout the book Evicted, Matthew Desmond shows how the market for low-income renters is stacked against them in many ways that are unfair and often exploitative. Without a strong system to ensure that everyone who needs housing is able to access basic and reasonable housing, the bottom of the market for renters becomes a scramble for a small number of dilapidated and overpriced units. Low-income renters cannot walk away from properties that they find unacceptable, because the alternative is reliance on overcrowded and stressed homeless shelters. In the end, this allows landlords to disinvest in their rental properties while maintaining high rental rates.
Desmond writes, “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.”
Unfortunately, our nation’s history of redlining and lingering structural racism has created dense minority ghettos in our country. Black people are limited in where they can look for housing, with landlords in white and middle-class parts of cities tacitly refusing to rent to minorities. Desmond shares a story of two black roommates who were showed a rental unit, only to have the landlords suddenly receive a phone call from a tenant accepting a rental agreement, removing the property from the market. In the only instance of the book where Desmond deliberately interfered with the subjects he was studying, he contacted the landlord after he told the black roommates the property was no longer available posing potential renter and was told the property was available [Author note: Desmond is a white male]. Black people are still to this day stuck in areas where local governments and businesses have disinvested, depressing the property values.
As Desmond shows, this creates a situation where landlords can purchase properties cheaply and rent to residents who can’t find housing outside of these disinvested areas. Since black and brown people can’t go elsewhere to find housing, where the rent is equivalent but the properties are nicer, they have to accept high rents for dilapidated units. Poor minority renters are taken advantage of by landlords who purchase cheap houses and charge high rents. This system reinforces structural racism and inequality for the lowest income minority renters in our nation.
Housing Vouchers - Joe Abittan - Matthew Desmond - Evicted

Housing Vouchers

Posted on by jabittan
Housing vouchers have been a major political win for landlords and realtors. Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted is about the real negative consequences of America’s high cost of housing, and he addresses housing vouchers which have been one of the main forms of public assistance for low-income renters. Our country likes market, or near-market, mechanisms to provide aid and assistance. Housing vouchers represent that preferred market mechanism, especially when compared to government provided, low cost housing. However, housing vouchers are not necessarily the most efficient way to provide assistance to those who cannot afford a place to live.
Desmond writes, “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.”
Housing vouchers are taken advantage of and abused by landlords and the companies managing apartment complexes. If an individual with a voucher is not facing the full cost of the housing unit, then they don’t have the same market pressures to find alternative housing options. The result is that higher rent can be charged, with that higher rent absorbed by the voucher. Money and aid is ultimately wasted, and families who could receive help do not receive it.
The extra money that can be made by overcharging voucher holders is a windfall for landlords and realtors, and unsurprisingly, both groups lobbied for voucher systems rather than government provided housing. Desmond writes, “Landlords and realtors saw government-built and -managed buildings offered at cut-rate rents as a direct threat to their legitimacy and bottom line.” If the government could provide housing at reasonable rates, then renters wouldn’t have to put up with high rent and lousy living conditions in slums. Contrasting a voucher program that encourage rent seeking behavior, those who profit from vouchers would lose money under a system bolstered by public housing and would have to lower rents or improve property to compete against government housing that didn’t have a profit motive.
It is easy to say that government-built and -managed housing has failed in the United States and that vouchers are clearly the superior way to provide housing assistance, even if they are inefficient. But I don’t think that is a truly valid argument, and I don’t think Desmond would find it a compelling argument either. Massive housing projects in the United States were built in a way that clustered poverty, creating dense units of low-income individuals. Research from Raj Chetty has shown that economic integration and mixing is important for social and economic success, and the experience of those living in dense housing projects supports Chetty’s research. Housing projects were also constructed at a time when cities and local governments were disinvesting in inner cities, before lead abatement programs had taken hold, and when the nation had not yet begun to reckon with its racist past. In some ways it seems as if these approaches to government housing projects were intentionally designed to fail.
I don’t see any reason why government-built and -managed housing could not be successful today if built in a more dispersed manner, if designed to integrate poor, and constructed to be responsive to the racists history of housing, drug, and incarceration policy of our nation. Of course this would require real investment from the government, contrasting the disinvestment that mass housing projects once witnessed. Political considerations are the real barrier, as realtors and landlords would surely seize upon the history of failed housing projects, and stoke fear of crime and dereliction that many American’s likely harbor around public housing. Unfortunately, our unwillingness to imagine a new form of government housing means that we are stuck with inefficient housing vouchers, lobbied by (and potentially doing more to benefit) landlords and realtors than the people who are the intended recipients.
Unemployment Statistics Miss Informal Labor

Unemployment Statistics Miss Informal Labor

Posted on by jabittan
“Reported high rates of joblessness among black men with little education obscured the fact that many of these men did regularly work, if not in the formal labor market,” writes Matthew Desmond in Evicted. Labor force participation rates are important because they inform national policies and discussions regarding the economy, society, and how we understand ourselves relative to others. What Desmond’s quote shows is that national labor force participation rates don’t capture a full picture of work, and as a result, our policies, discussions, and interpretations of the world of work may be inaccurate.
 
 
Desmond’s focus is on the way that landlords are able to access poor tenants as a form of free – or sometimes low paid – unregulated labor. Poor tenants, especially in the reporting from Desmond poor black men, are available for hire in exchange for breaks on rent or quick cash. Payments are not often up to minimum wage standards and requirements, and the work can range from relatively unimportant fence painting to crucial code compliance updates for landlords’ properties. A tenant may be hired to help paint a hand rail or may be hired to repair a roof, and when their work is under the table, then their safety can be at jeopardy. Nevertheless, as Desmond shows, informal labor is common among unemployed men.
 
 
Our welfare and assistance policies are designed so that able bodied young men must meet certain requirements before they can receive any benefits or aid. Many policies require work, community service, or job search activities before any benefits will kick in. Informal labor doesn’t count in this system, so men cannot be seen as deserving of aid if they only find work in the informal labor sector. Informal labor may help poor men get by, but it doesn’t help them get ahead.
 
 
The fact that many poor men find work within informal labor markets should tell us that these men can function within society and can find productive ways to earn money. It tells us that these men have been shut out by various structures and systems that don’t permit them to work in formal economies. When landlords come around and help get these men to a job then they do work, at least enough to get by. They don’t all do a great job once they are working, as Desmond shows in his book, but with a little help they can get started. I Think this is an important point to consider. Often the arrangements are not fair and  the work is not great, but informal labor does take place, and can tell us a lot about the people whose work is not counted elsewhere and the types of systems that could be built to reach them.

How Men & Women Experience the Threat of Eviction

How Men and Women Experience the Threat of Eviction

Posted on by jabittan
The poorest people in our country are often in danger of being taken advantage of or exploited. For low income renters, their need for shelter and limited housing options means that they have to negotiate deals to avoid eviction or try to work out better arrangements with more powerful landlords. In the book Evicted, Matthew Desmond shows how these negotiations differ for men and women and how these arrangements can be particularly exploitative and dangerous for women.
 
 
“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. … When women did approach their landlords with such an offer, it sometimes involved trading sex for rent.”
 
 
Gender disparities in our nation translate into different experiences of exploitation and danger for men and women in our lowest socioeconomic ranks. Low skill and low wage men are expected to work and produce, and this expectation affords them extra opportunities to find ways to pay their rent and avoid eviction. Landlords, Desmond explains, are more willing to offer men the chance to work off late rent by providing them some form of manual labor that will help benefit the landlord and their tenants or properties. Rarely do women receive the same offers, and Desmond explains that women rarely seek out similar arrangement themselves. Various gendered norms and expectations end up making it harder for women to skate by with odd jobs at the lowest levels than men who are given extra chances, even if those extra chances are physically demanding and potentially dangerous.
 
 
Desmond’s quote also hints at another gendered norm that makes life in the lowest socioeconomic status harder for women than men. Women are expected to take care of children, if they have any, and this means they have less time and flexibility in picking up extra work for their landlord in exchange for rent. Welfare often requires that an individual spend a certain amount of time in school, searching for a job or working, or engaging with certain productive volunteer activities. Women who try to adhere to these requirements, all while caring for kids or men who did not try to meet such requirements, could not possibly take on more gig work to make a little extra cash to avoid eviction.
 
 
Finally, Desmond’s quote highlights the exploitative and dangerous reality that many low socioeconomic status women find themselves in. The gendered disparities and power disparities between these women and their landlords often means they have nothing to negotiate with for rent other than their bodies. Trading sex for rent is dangerous for the women, exploitative, and in many ways degrading. It is not the case that every individual facing eviction experiences these realities exactly as I have described them based on gender, but it is often the case that the threat of eviction manifests differently for men and women, in part due to larger gender biases that exist within our society.

Losing Wealth - Matthew Desmond Evicted

Losing Wealth

Posted on by jabittan
During the Great Recession many Americans lost a lot of wealth, through lost wages from lost jobs and lost equity in homes as bankruptcies and mortgage defaults rocked the national economy. The Great Recession is a major factor that contributed to the housing crisis that Matthew Desmond looks at in his book Evicted. Additionally, it greatly contributed to the racial disparities in homelessness and poverty that Desmond explores and documents in the book.
Regarding the impact of the Great Recession to black and white families, Desmond writes, “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.” He states that black and brown neighborhoods were targeted by banks pushing subprime mortgages, the vehicle that failed and ultimately crashed the entire banking and financial industry. Predatory mortgage and loan practices impacted many families, as the statistics in Desmond’s quote shows, but impacted black and brown families much more than white families.
The loss of wealth from the Great Recession will have a long tail. Wealth is different from income and can have long-term consequences for individuals and their family members for several generations. Wealth is the total value of the assets and property that an individual owns. Homes, cars, fancy paintings, family wedding rings, and cash in the bank all factor into a person’s wealth. Throughout American history, public policy and social norms have reinforced structures that allowed white Americans to generate wealth at the expense or exclusion of minorities. The result is a massive wealth gap today, even as minority populations have closed income gaps. Minorities may be on par with whites in terms of wages and salaries, but they are still far behind whites when it comes to total wealth and asset valuations.
Familial wealth allows individuals and families to weather storms like the Great Recession. Whites didn’t lose as much wealth as blacks and Hispanics because their families had more wealth that could be tapped into in order to keep up mortgage payments during an unemployment spell to avoid losing a home. Whites likely had better financial terms on their mortgages and loans because they had more wealth and could have wealthy family members co-sign mortgages or loans to improve the terms. The end result was that wealth helped protect wealth during the Great Recession, while minority populations who were already less wealthy than whites took a harder hit.
Scarcity & Short-Term Thinking

Scarcity & Short-Term Thinking

Posted on by jabittan
I find critiques of people living in poverty to generally be unfair and shallow. People living in poverty with barely enough financial resources to get through the day are criticized for not making smart investments of their time and money, and are criticized when they spend in a seemingly irrational manner. But for low income individuals who can’t seem to get ahead no matter what jobs they take, these critiques seem to miss the reality of life at the poorest socioeconomic level.
I wrote recently about the costs of work, which are not often factored into our easy critiques of the poor or unemployed. Much of America has inefficient and underinvested public transit. The time involved with catching a bus (or two) to get to work are huge compared with simply driving to work. Additionally, subways and other transports can be dangerous (there is no shortage of Youtube videos of people having phones stolen on public transit). This means that owning and maintaining a car can be essential for being able to work, an expensive cost that can make working prohibitive for those living in poverty.
The example of transportation to work is meant to demonstrate that not working can be a more rational choice for the poorest among us. Work involves extra stress and costs, and the individual might not break even, making unemployment the more rational choice. There are a lot of instances where the socially desirable thing becomes the irrational choice for those living in poverty. If we do not recognize this reality, then we will unfairly criticize the choices and decisions of the poor.
In his book Evicted, Matthew Desmond writes about scarcity and short-term thinking, showing that they are linked and demonstrating how this shapes the lives of those living in poverty. “research show[s] that under conditions of scarcity people prioritize the now and lose sight of the future, often at great cost.” People living in scarcity have trouble thinking ahead and planning for their future. When you don’t know where you will sleep, where your next meal will come from, and if you will be able to afford the next basic necessities, it is hard to think ahead to everything you need to do for basic living in American society. Your decisions  might not make sense to the outside world, but to you it makes sense because all you have is the present moment, and no prospects regarding the future to plan for or think about. Sudden windfalls may be spent irrationally, time may not be spent resourcefully, and tradeoffs that benefit the current moment and the expense of the future may seem like obvious choices if you live in constant scarcity.
Combined, the misperceptions about the cost of work and the psychological short-termism resulting from scarcity show us that we have to approach poverty differently from how we approach lazy middle class individuals. I think we design our programs for assisting those in poverty while thinking of middle class lazy people. We don’t think about individuals who are actually so poor that the costs of work that most of us barely think about become crippling. We  don’t consider how scarcity shapes the way people think, leading them to make poor decisions that seem obvious for us to critique from the outside. Deep poverty creates challenges and obstacles that are separate from the problem of free loading and lazy middle class children or trust fund babies. We have to recognize this if we are to actually improve the lives of the poorest among us and create a better social and economic system to help integrate those individuals.
Evidence of Structural Racism

Evidence of Structural Racism

Posted on by jabittan
What is and what is not racism in America today is a difficult question. We easily denounce racial slurs and instances of racism where someone openly states they dislike people due to race, but we have trouble identifying racism that is not so explicit. We have trouble identifying structural and systemic racism, but we know that it exists and that it has real world consequences for black people in our country. A couple of weeks ago, in a post on his blog Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen noted that racial segregation is increasing in many parts of America. White people choosing not to live near black people can be explained in many innocuous ways, but ultimately we must accept, the statistics of racial segregation reveal a system of structural racism in our country.
In the book Evicted, author Matthew Desmond confronts structural racism directly. He writes, “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.” Eviction is a downstream consequence of structural racism. Structural racism can appear rational and equitable on the surface, but it often is built upon decades of deeply racist policies. When a population has been consistently held back due to racist policies, then racially neutral policies will still produce racist outcomes years after the deliberately racist policies have been removed. I think that Desmond would agree that this is what is at the heart of the racial disparities in evictions in Milwaukee and across the country.
Desmond continues, “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.” Black men have been arrested at rates that don’t match their likelihood to use drugs or commit crime relative to white men and this has often meant that black mothers had less support for raising children and providing housing, food, and basic needs for families. This is part of why black women in Milwaukee are evicted at rates beyond their proportion of city residents. While we cannot look at any single incident and determine that racism is the cause of why a man was arrested or a woman evicted, we can look at the overwhelming evidence of segregation and disparate policing and evictions to see that structural racism is defining the lives of poor black men and women. We can see the evidence of structural racism and know that it is shaping lives and worlds that white and black people in our country experience. We cannot always say that a single instance is the outcome of racism, but we still know it is shaping what is happening.
After I wrote this piece Cowen also wrote about attractiveness, citing a David Brooks column. The column itself cites a study showing that the attractiveness bias in the United States is especially punishing to black women, demonstrating additional barriers that black women can face due to structural racism that creates beauty standards that outcasts poor black women. More evicdence of structural racism.
Skipping Eviction Court

Skipping Eviction Court

Posted on by jabittan
“Roughly 70 percent of tenants summoned to Milwaukee’s eviction court didn’t come. The same was true in other major cities. In some urban courts, only 1 tenant in 10 showed,” writes Matthew Desmond in Evicted. An inherent power dynamic exists between the poorest renters in our nation and the landlords who rent to them. There are more poor people who are desperate for even the worst quality housing than there are low-rent units available for rent. This means that poor individuals are at the mercy of landlords as they compete for the worst of the worst housing units. As Desmond’s quote above demonstrates, eviction courts end up being another avenue through which landlords exercise unequal power over tenants.
Desmond continues, “Some tenants couldn’t miss work or couldn’t find child care or were confused by the whole process or couldn’t care less or would rather avoid the humiliation.” For a variety of factors, eviction court is harder to attend for those getting evicted than for those doing the evicting. Landlords who don’t work a typical 9 to 5 have more time and flexibility to attend court hearings than low-income renters who work strict schedules. Landlords have more ability to learn the eviction court process, familiarizing themselves with the right procedures and arguments to win cases if a tenant were to show up. Eviction court often doesn’t end up serving as an aid or a protection to low-income tenants who hit an unlucky spell or who had to face unreasonable living conditions due to landlord neglect. Instead, it reinforces the power dynamics that exist between landlords and low-income renters.
I understand that being a landlord to low-income renters is not easy. I recognize that landlords are property owners and need to make money on their rental investments. I can understand how frustrating it would be to have tenant after tenant fail to pay their rent, continuously providing excuses for why they need a break, and to deal with damage to rental properties that barely provide a profit. However, the power dynamics backed by legal structures like eviction court often set poor renters back and prevent them from ever finding stable footing. If the rental market is so terrible for landlords and creates such deep problems for  renters, then is it worthwhile to find a different mechanism, other than markets, to ensure low-income individuals have stable housing?
Clearly dense housing projects are not the answer, but something outside of slumlord arrangements needs to be done. Lacking stable housing makes it harder for the poor to work, harder to raise their children without their kids facing adverse childhood experiences which make their life outcomes worse, and harder for them to be functioning members of society. Skipping eviction court, Desmond argues, is a symptom of the broken down system for low-income market provided housing. One way or another, we have to innovate to help our poorest find some stability from which they can begin to live better lives without the humiliation and threat of constant eviction.
Concentrating the Deviant & Derelict

Concentrating the Deviant & Derelict

Posted on by jabittan
“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,” writes Matthew Desmond in Evicted. There is an old idea I came across again recently that suggests that you are in some ways the product of the five people you spend the most time with. Who you are around and what kind of people they are like makes a difference in the person you become. Usually, in the United States, this is presented to us as a warning to be responsible for having upstanding friends and colleagues who will make us better people. But this sentiment can also be understood not as a rallying call for personal responsibility, but as a cudgel against personal responsibility.
We are not our own independent entities free from societal influence and pressures.  The world around us shapes how we see that very same world. It influences what we see as possible, moral, acceptable, and excusable. It defines our horizon and opens or closes certain doors and directions. It challenges the idea that our life is entirely within our own hands. Desmond’s quote above shows that poverty and crime run together, and it shows that if you are poor, you are probably stuck around criminals, meaning that the poorest among us are stuck among the worst among us. If the saying that you are the people you spend most of your time around, then those in poverty are stuck becoming deviants.
“This also mean[s] that violence, drug activity, deep poverty, and other social problems coalesced at a much smaller, more acute level than the neighborhood. They gather[ ] at the same address,” continues Desmond.
Our market approach to housing means that those who have a history of not making rent payments, who have a history of drug abuse or violence, and those who have made poor decisions in the past are grouped together, often ending up in the same household splitting rent. If you are the product of the five people around you the most, then being surrounded by only other derelict or deviant individuals cannot possibly make you anything other than the worst version of yourself possible. None of us would want to live surrounded by poor, defeated, and destitute individuals. If we are honest with ourselves, we can see how being stuck in such a situation would make it effectively impossible for us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, unless we are a truly remarkable person.
Our failures of housing policy have resulted in a dramatic economic segregation. Understandably, all of us as individuals want to move away from places of crime, drug use, and poverty (I am guilty here as well). We want to limit the amount of time we have to interact with the deviant and derelict, but in doing so, we cluster those poor, violent, and/or apathetic individuals together, creating the conditions for a downward spiral for anyone who gets caught amongst our lowest ranks. This is not a problem of just the individuals stuck in these situations. It is a problem and failure of society more broadly. A failure to ensure that poverty does not pit one solely among deviants. A failure to give those deviants a safe place to take steps to improve their lives. And a failure to demonstrate social responsibility to work with the destitute to show them that they are valued and can indeed improve their lives.
Housing or Dignity

Housing or Dignity

Posted on by jabittan
For most Americans who rent a home or apartment, if something important breaks, like a pipe or part of the HVAC system, they can expect the landlord to respond and fix the problem in a reasonable time. However, our nation’s poorest individuals cannot always expect to have repairs to the housing they rent made in a reasonable and timely manner. Rents are expensive, and for many Americans work is hard to find and payments for housing falls behind. When this happens, exploitation is possible and many low-income renters end up trading their dignity for their housing.
In Evicted Matthew Desmond follows a landlord named Sherrena through the general course of her day managing several rental units for low-income individuals. In the book, several of Sherrena’s tenants fall behind on their rent and need help getting by. This creates a situation where Sherrena is able to skirt the rules on maintenance and upkeep for her rental properties. Desmond writes, “as Sherrena put it to tenants: if I give you a break, you give me a break.” The implication is clear, if you are a difficult tenant due to noise complaints, damage to the property, or late rent, don’t expect the landlord to stick to the letter of the law in terms of fixing and repairing the rental property. Its not so much giving Sherrena a break in terms of being slow to address concerns but rather an acknowledgement that Sherrena giving a tenant a break is an exercise of power which allows her to then avoid legal requirements related to general property upkeep.
There is a transactional sense where this seems logical. If a tenant is going to be late on payments or difficult in one way or another, then they should expect that the landlord is going to be less cooperative in return. This is a classic tit for tat type of transactional relationship where one person responds in kind to the provocations of the other. But as Desmond describes, and Sherrena’s quote demonstrates, this creates exploitative relationships between landlords and poor renters.
“Tenants could trade their dignity and children’s health for a roof over their head.” Housing prices across the nation have increased at a time when wages have stagnated for many people. Prior to 2020, unemployment reached record lows, but still, many people had left the job market and couldn’t find adequate work to support them with a living wage. For these individuals, being able to afford rent month after month is a major challenge.
Falling behind on rent may mean that a landlord will ignore problems with the rental property. This could mean they don’t call an exterminator if bugs are found in the building, that they don’t fix a broken window, or that they don’t hire a plumber to repair a clogged toilet. Renters who are behind on rent or have rocky relationships with the landlord have to put up with unsanitary or dangerous living conditions until they can get current on rent or catch up on any back payments. Being poor means they trade in their dignity and health in order to not get kicked out of their rental. We can argue that this is simply market dynamics and rational behavior on the part of landlords, but we should acknowledge that there is a dignity trade off taking place and that low-income renters can be exploited by more powerful landlords. This is a real issue that we should care about, no matter how lazy, how undeserving, or how bad we find the choices an individual has made to end up in their current situation. Trading dignity for housing should simply be untenable.