![\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AWalkers_point_neighborhood_milwaukee.jpg;](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2018\/01\/Walkers_point_neighborhood_milwaukee-1024x683.jpg\")
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Or, \u201cFrom the library: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond.\u201d<\/p>\n
The book takes the form of a prologue with context, a long narrative telling the stories of the poor tenants of Milwaukee, and of their landlords, based on ethnographic fieldwork, and an epilogue with proposals.\u00a0 By \u201cethnographic fieldwork\u201d I mean that the author, a Harvard professor, spent time living in a trailer park and in an inner city apartment, spending copious amounts of time with the individuals he profiled.\u00a0 He also spearheaded a detailed study of poor renters in Milwaukee.\u00a0 Oddly, the ethnographic research took place in 2008 \u2013 2009, and tenant study from 2009 \u2013 2011, but the book wasn\u2019t published until 2016; maybe there\u2019s an explanation that I\u2019ve missed in the book, or maybe he just got delayed with the additional research and wasn\u2019t able to complete it until he had more time available (he was, according to the book jacket, given a MacArthur \u201cGenius\u201d grant in 2015).\u00a0 Is the material invalid due to the delay in publication?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know, but it seems likely that the initial post-recession time period might have been more extreme in the situations families faced.<\/p>\n
In any case, any time we see the reports comparing the median rent to the income of low-income families, I\u2019m always skeptical.\u00a0 \u201cOf course, you can\u2019t expect the lowest-decile workers to be able to afford median-priced rents; I\u2019ll believe there\u2019s a housing-cost crisis when you compare lowest-decile household incomes to lowest-decile<\/em> rents.\u201d\u00a0 But what Desmond reported is that the rents that the very poorest pay are not dramatically lower than everyone else\u2019s, even though their apartments are generally (or often) in far worse condition, with broken or missing appliances, clogged sinks, leaking pipes, broken windows, and the like.\u00a0 They get the dregs of apartment buildings because of their conviction and eviction histories, lack of credit and work histories, and so on.\u00a0 Having multiple children makes apartment-hunting even harder, say, if a family is limited to two-bedroom units because of finances but they have more children than occupancy limits provide for, or if landlords simply don\u2019t want children, or many children, in their buildings (regardless of the law on the matter).<\/p>\n And they are evicted frequently \u2014 partly because their extreme poverty means that they pay nearly all of their cash income (or welfare\/SSI benefits) in rent; though food stamps cover their food costs, they have little left over for unexpected needs.\u00a0 (This also means that, in some instances, they sell food stamps to get cash, then get their food from food pantries until the next month comes.)\u00a0 They also get evicted after complaining about the condition of the apartment \u2014 either because the landlord accuses the tenant of being at fault for the claimed damage, like clogging the sink, or because the landlord decides to no longer let late rent slide after a complaint.\u00a0 And they get evicted in efforts to keep crime out of the units \u2014 whether the tenants are perpetrators (e.g., drug users), family members of druggies, or victims (e.g., of domestic abuse, with a boyfriend coming by and kicking down a door), or if there are police or ambulance calls for entirely unrelated reasons (e.g., an ambulance\/fire visit for an asthmatic child).\u00a0 In some cases, they are compelled by the police to evict \u2014 presumably (though the book doesn\u2019t state this) as an outcome of efforts to punish landlords for \u201charboring\u201d criminals.<\/p>\n Desmond further profiles the difficulties the evictees have in trying to find new housing, as one woman calls 90-some-odd units before finding a landlord willing to take her on, in the meantime bouncing from one friend or relative or shelter to another, furniture and belongings in storage.\u00a0 Multiple generations squeeze into small apartments, sleeping on couches or on the floor.\u00a0 A woman turns tricks, leading johns into the bedroom and past the children in the living room.<\/p>\n Some of the individuals she profiles are addicted to drugs.\u00a0 Others receive SSI (due to mental health disabilities such as depression) or welfare.\u00a0 Some make their way with little more than food stamps and under the table work.\u00a0 One woman had a steady job at Old Country Buffet but spiraled into homelessness after having her hours cut.\u00a0 I don\u2019t quite know what to make of the fact that none of the people Desmond profiles are the \u201cworking poor\u201d whose paychecks, despite their steady jobs, aren\u2019t enough to keep them stably-housed; maybe, no matter their troubles, they just aren\u2019t as dramatic as these \u201cworst-case\u201d stories.<\/p>\n But what are Desmond\u2019s solutions?<\/p>\n The first of these is simply to provide tenants with free attorneys to even their odds against landlords, who he believes make far more money than they \u201cdeserve.\u201d\u00a0 He cites a program that provided such legal aid and prevented eviction in 86% of cases \u2014 though it\u2019s not clear if 86% of all potential evictees won their cases, or if legal aid screened clients for their likelihood of success.\u00a0 His second proposal is far bigger:\u00a0 making housing vouchers as universally-available as food stamps are, with households qualifying solely based on income cut-offs.\u00a0 Call them \u201chouse stamps\u201d \u2014 but instead of having the allotment based on the average cost of the \u201cthrifty\u201d meal plan, scaled to result in recipients hypothetically paying 30% of their income on food, the government would calculate a \u201cfair\u201d rent for a given apartment based on its particulars (presumably size, location, condition, and so forth), would calculate, for a given family, the level of apartment they are eligible for, and then require (as is already the case for Section 8 vouchers) that the recipient pay 30% of income, and the government would pay the rest.\u00a0 In order to ensure that enough apartments are available for recipients, the government would require all landlords to accept these vouchers, much as they already require that they comply with anti-discrimination laws.<\/p>\n So easy-peasy, right?\u00a0 Well, other than the cost, which he pegs at $22.5 billion, based on a 2013 study on housing vouchers for everyone below the 30th percentile in income.\u00a0 He proposes funding that by eliminating mortgage interest deductions and the capital-gains exclusion.<\/p>\n But Desmond assumes that landlords are making money hand-over-fist and these are somehow \u201cexcess\u201d profits that can be easily removed.\u00a0 But if being a landlord was so immensely profitable and landlords are making far more money than they \u201cdeserve,\u201d then you\u2019d think that there would be far more landlords in the business, competing for the business of the poor and ultimately, by the greater number of available units, bringing quality up or prices down, or both.\u00a0 But how many landlords are there who want to deal with poor people, nagging them to pay up, dealing with unpaid rents, and with the crime that occurs, and the damage, whether intentional or the result of the chaotic lives of the poor (e.g., 8 people living in a home the plumbing of which was designed for a fraction of that number)?<\/p>\n To be sure, a part of the reason for the high rents, relative to the condition of the homes, and the difficulty the poor in having finding units, is their risk of nonpayment; having reliably-paying tenants would solve this part of the problem.\u00a0 But would the government manage to set the voucher amounts at the right level for prospective landlords to start up a property-rental business, especially given the risk that those bureaucrats could decide, in the future, to reduce the voucher amounts by redefining \u201cfairness.\u201d<\/p>\n So there\u2019s not really an easy answer.\u00a0 It\u2019s a chicken-and-egg issue:\u00a0 the chaotic lives of the poor make them unreliable tenants, but their propensity to get expelled prevents them from turning their lives around.\u00a0 Of course, at the same time, Desmond is perhaps too sunny about the ability of the poor to improve their lot in life if only they had stable housing, when, in reality, \u201cthe projects\u201d (that is, public housing) is chock full of people whose protection against high rents does not bring them any closer to the ideal of jobs, education, self-improvement, and raising a generation of children who are able to move off welfare.<\/p>\n In fact, Desmond closes his narrative with two individuals he cites has having received\/found housing, then being able to turn their lives around, but the cases don\u2019t actually prove his point.\u00a0 In the one case, \u201cScott\u201d kicked his heroin habit by daily visits to a methadone clinic while living at a homeless shelter at which he eventually became a resident manager; only after he was on a path to recovery and stability did he have the opportunity for subsidized housing.\u00a0 In the other case, he reports that a single mother of multiple children moved out of Milwaukee to a small town in Tennessee where she \u201cfound a nice three-bedroom place\u201d and earned her GED and started at community college \u2014 but the cause of her success isn\u2019t clear:\u00a0 did her SSI money stretch further in a small town?\u00a0 Did leaving the dysfunctions of her old neighborhood help her make a fresh start?\u00a0 It\u2019s as clear as mud.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Image: Walker\u2019s Point neighborhood, Milwaukee.\u00a0 https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AWalkers_point_neighborhood_milwaukee.jpg; By Flickr user compujeramey [CC BY 2.0 (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Or, \u201cFrom the library: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond.\u201d The book takes the form of a prologue with context, a long narrative telling the stories of the poor tenants of Milwaukee, and of their landlords, based on ethnographic fieldwork, and an epilogue with proposals.\u00a0 By \u201cethnographic fieldwork\u201d I mean […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[397],"class_list":["post-8074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-affordable-housing"],"yoast_head":"\n