This is a summary of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. The book follows 8 different tenant families, their landlords, and the events in their lives related to housing. Their stories take place in Milwaukee during 2008 and 2009, and Desmond intersperses his narrative with facts and statistics about housing and evictions.
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Key Takeaways from Evicted
- Evictions used to be rare but are now pretty common in America. Between 2009 and 2011, more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move. Numbers are similar in many other American cities.
- While poverty can cause evictions, evictions also cause poverty. Evictions are extremely disruptive to people’s lives and they can end up losing everything as a result – jobs, possessions, even sometimes their children.
- A lot of evictions are “informal” ones where the landlord has made the tenant leave without filing a formal eviction order. Formal court statistics therefore significantly underestimate the prevalence of evictions. Survey responses can also underestimate evictions as tenants often don’t say they’ve been “evicted” unless they got a formal court order.
- Black women, particularly those with children, are heavily overrepresented in evictions. Having children will increase one’s likelihood by being evicted about as much as being 4 months’ late with the rent.
- Government, policy officials and academics have not paid enough attention to evictions or to the private rental market until now. They have instead largely focused their attentions on public housing and voucher programs, which help a tiny slice of the people in need.
- Desmond proposes a significantly expanded housing voucher program as a solution. However, he does not spend a lot of time on this, only mentioning it in the epilogue. The book is more focused on drawing attention to the problem than on advocating a particular solution.
Detailed Summary of Evicted
The stories
Tenants
The tenants mentioned include:
- Arleen, a single black mother, and her two sons Joris (15) and Jafaris (5). She has 3 other children, but they are in the foster system and do not feature in the book. Arleen is evicted when her home is found “unfit for human habitation”. She spends some time in one of Sherrena’s units, but is evicted again after falling behind on rent. Arleen spends the rest of the book looking for a new home, which proves incredibly difficult. The book starts and ends with Arleen’s story.
- Lamar, a single black father who has lost the use of his legs, and his two sons Luke (16) and Eddy (15). Lamar tries to pay off some of his rental debt by doing odd jobs, but his landlord, Sherrena, is not satisfied by his work quality. He is evicted after a fire damages the unit he lives in, though Sherrena had wanted to evict him beforehand anyway.
- The Hickstons, a family of eight (plus a dog), who live in an extremely dilapidated two-bedroom apartment. They had previously lived in a 5-bedroom house but had to move after a street shooting caused the police to visit their place. The police saw a mess and called Child Protection Services, which led to the building inspector ordering the landlord to evict them. When the Hickstons moved into the 2-bedroom place they had expected it would be temporary. But they ended up staying for longer.
- Crystal, an 18-year-old black woman who had grown up in the foster system. Crystal has bipolar and a number of other personality disorders. She alternates between kind-hearted and volatile. Crystal is also religious.
- Vanetta, a 20-year-old single black mother of three who befriends Crystal in homeless shelter. Vanetta finds herself evicted after her hours at work are slashed, causing her to fall behind in rent. One day she commits an impulsive armed robbery with a friend and is caught and convicted.
- Pam and Ned, a white couple who get evicted from a trailer park while Pam is pregnant. Pam also has two half-black daughters from a previous (abusive) relationship. They fall behind on rent after Pam’s car breaks down and caused her to lose her job.
- Scott, a former nurse turned drug addict, who gets evicted from the same trailer park after he lets Pam and Ned stay with him. Originally Scott lives in the trailer with his friend Teddy, but Teddy moves back home Tennessee after eviction.
- Larraine, a 54-year-old white woman with fibromyalgia. Larraine also gets evicted from the trailer park but moves to her brother’s trailer (without his knowledge). She sees her poverty as permanent and looks for ways to enjoy her life despite it. At one memorable point in the book, she uses her entire monthly allocation food stamps to buy lobster tails, shrimp and crab legs, which she eats in a single sitting.
Landlords
Evicted features two landlords:
- Sherrena, the landlord of (at some point) Arleen, Lamar, the Hickstons, and Crystal.
- The vast majority of landlords were white and male, so Sherrena was unusual in that she was black and a woman.
- Sherrena and her husband, Quentin, specialised in renting to poor black people in the inner city as white landlords were usually too nervous to buy in that area.
- Sherrena’s rental portfolio at the time consisted of 36 properties, and she estimated her net worth to be around $2 million.
- Tobin, the owner of the College Mobile Home trailer park.
- His father had been a landlord who owned almost 600 units at one point.
- Tobin would try to work with his tenants when they fell behind on rent, but he was also relentless in pursuing his debts. In an average month, nearly one-third of his trailer park tenants were behind, but Tobin only evicted a handful each month.
- Tobin bought the trailer park for $2.1 million in 1995 and paid it off 9 years later. After accounting for expenses, vacancies and missing payments, Tobin netted around $447,000 each year.
The facts
About Milwaukee
- Milwaukee’s population had fallen from over 740,000 in 1960 to less than 600,000. There were plenty of abandoned properties as a result. [When I went back and re-read this, it surprised me. Given the difficulties tenants faced in finding properties to live in, I had assumed there was a housing shortage. I would have thought that a declining population would mean an oversupply of housing, putting downward pressure on rents.]
- Milwaukee used to have a lot of good jobs in the postwar years, but lost lots of manufacturing jobs in the early 1980s. Some people found new jobs in the service sector, but only with substantial pay cuts.
- In the 1990s, Jason Turner, a conservative reformer, used Milwaukee in a policy experiment known as “Wisconsin Works” or “W-2”. The idea was that only people who worked would get a welfare check, even if that job was just sorting stuff that needed to be re-sorted later. [Sort of like that Bullshit Jobs thing.] People who didn’t comply would have their food stamps slashed. 22,000 Milwaukee families were cut from the welfare rolls.
- Between 1997 and 2008, welfare stipends in Milwaukee and most other places did not increase even as housing costs soared. In 2008, Arleen received a stipend of $7,536 a year.
- Landlords could easily find people to do small jobs. Tenants often asked for work, and there were plenty of men in the inner city out of work. People were willing to work off the books for very low pay – from $6 to $10 per hour.
Housing in Milwaukee
- Milwaukee is America’s most segregated city. The Menominee River Valley cuts through the city, dividing its North Side (predominantly black) from its South Side (predominantly white).
- According to Sherrena, there was a mismatch between Milwaukee’s strict building code and its worn-out housing stock. Very few houses in the city were up to code. But landlords could rent units with property code violations – even severe ones – as long as they were upfront about them.
- Rent in Milwaukee fell within a relatively narrow band.
- The bottom 10% of units rented at or below $480 per month. The top 10% rented at or above $750. Rent in some of the worst neighbourhoods was therefore not drastically cheaper than rent in much better areas.
- Landlords at the bottom of the market generally did not lower rents to meet demand or avoid the costs of missed payments and evictions. Desmond suggests that this was so that landlords wouldn’t have to bear the costs of maintaining their properties. By keeping rents high, landlords could ensure their tenants were perpetually behind. Tenants who fall behind are more reluctant to summon a building inspector. This could be very lucrative – Sherrena’s most profitable properties were her worst properties. [This could be true but it sounds like no-cause evictions were also legal. So even if a landlord lowered the rent to a sustainable level, tenants might still be reluctant to call a building inspector in the fear that they’d lose their reasonably-priced place. Also, if the only reason the landlord kept the rent unsustainably high was so that tenants wouldn’t complain about repairs – couldn’t they charge a notionally high rent but keep forgiving part of the rent to avoid the costs of eviction if they found a particularly good tenant? It sounds like the costs of eviction – and vacancy – are just not that high, which suggests a lack of housing supply relative to demand.]
- Unlike other goods and services, tenants are not really able to consume less of it when the price goes up:
- Cheaper and smaller housing simply doesn’t exist in most parts of America. In Milwaukee, 97% of renters live in a one-, two- or three-bedroom unit. [Desmond writes that “Smaller housing units have vanished from the American city”. Is he referring to studio units? What else can be smaller than a one-bedroom unit? Some people might refer to a studio as a one-bedroom unit in a survey.]
- Often the only way tenants can reduce their consumption of housing is by taking in boarders, but many landlords won’t allow this.
- Desmond notes that housing advocates tend to worry about overcrowding, but he thinks the bigger problem is undercrowding. Only 24% of poor renting households have more than 1.5 persons per bedroom, and only 8% of all renter households in Milwaukee have more than 2 people per bedroom. Desmond also points out that there is not much “robust causal evidence” of the effect of crowding.
- Landlords could obtain information about a person’s eviction and criminal record, credit score, previous addresses and other information for about $30. Screening practices among landlords were inconsistent – some screened heavily, others did not. Because landlords get to decide who gets to live where, those screening practices can explain why crime is high in one block and low in a neighbouring block.
- Under Milwaukee’s laws, landlords can go in any common areas of their property without giving the tenant prior notice.
- Inner-city landlords often wouldn’t provide appliances such as stoves or refrigerators in their units. If they provided it, they would have to fix it when it broke.
Children
- It’s much harder to find housing when you have children:
- In 1980, Housing and Urban Development commissioned a nationwide study and found that only 1 in 4 rental units was available to families without restrictions.
- All else equal, a 1% increase in the percentage of children in a neighbourhood is predicted to increase a neighbourhood’s evictions by almost 7%. This is based on court-ordered eviction records in Milwaukee in 2010.
- Families with children are not a protected class under the Fair Housing Act, so landlords could discriminate against tenants with children. [Even if they were a protected class, it would be difficult to enforce since a landlord could always claim they were deciding not to rent to a particular tenant for other reasons.]
- Reasons why landlords didn’t like renters with children included:
- Many parents in crime-ridden neighbourhoods would keep their children indoors to keep them safe. Children cooped up indoors could get up to mischief and cause property damage.
- If children tested positive to lead poisoning, it could result in an expensive abatement order.
- Child Protective Services caseworkers might also inspect families’ apartments for unsanitary or dangerous code violations.
Evictions
- Around a quarter of all moves by Milwaukee’s poorest renters were involuntary, based on information from 2009 and 2011. If you adjust for these involuntary moves, low-income households move at a similar rate to other households. The numbers are similar in other cities.
The eviction process
- In Milwaukee, landlords could evict people with only 5 days notice for unpaid rent. For “no cause” evictions, they had to give 28 days’ notice.
- Landlords would weigh up different factors when deciding whether to evict a tenant.
- The amount the tenant owed was relevant, as well as other factors such as whether they believed the tenant had money coming up (e.g. a tax refund).
- How a tenant responded to an eviction notice was also relevant. Women tended to avoid their landlords after they fell behind, while men tended to confront them. Landlords generally hated tenants avoiding them.
- Men would also often negotiate with landlords and offer to do some handyman jobs for landlords. Women hardly ever made similar offers. Sometimes it was because they didn’t have the time, but other times it was simply because they never thought of it.
- If a tenant doesn’t show up to court, the landlord can get a default judgment. About 70% of tenants summoned to eviction court don’t turn up. In some urban courts, it’s as high as 90%.
- In housing courts, around 90% of landlords have lawyers and around 90% of tenants do not.
- Of the tenants who did come to court and were evicted, only 1 in 6 had another place lined up (e.g. with family or a shelter). Most did not know where to go.
- In Milwaukee, black women are overrepresented in eviction courts:
- 3 in 4 people in Milwaukee eviction court were black. Of those, 3 in 4 were women.
- Women from black neighbourhoods made up 9% of Milwaukee’s population and 30% of its evicted tenants.
- 1 in 5 black female renters in Milwaukee report having been evicted in their adult life. In comparison, the rate is about 1 in 12 for Hispanic women and 1 in 15 for white women.
- Landlords usually sued tenants twice – first for the eviction, and then for the debt. The debt included unpaid rent as well as reasonable late fees, double rent for each day the tenant remained after eviction, and eviction costs. Often landlords couldn’t enforce these debt judgments, but would still file them because they would go on a tenant’s record. In the longer term, if a tenant got their finances together and wanted to get a student loan or buy a house, they might have to repay that debt to get it off their credit record.
- A formal eviction involving sheriffs and movers could cost around $600, including court fees.
- Milwaukee landlords could also bill tenants twice the rent for each day they remained on the property after the eviction.
The effects of eviction
- Eviction tended to cause two moves.
- The first would be a forced move into temporary and sometimes dangerous housing. The second would be an intentional move out of it, but this second move could take a while.
- Families who experience a forced move tend to relocate to worse neighbourhoods.
- When people moved to a place they considered “temporary”, they wouldn’t make it a point to know their neighbours or become part of the community there. In that way, evictions contribute to slums – neighbourhoods with high turnover rates and even higher rates of resentment and disinvestment.
- Evictions cause people to lose their possessions.
- Storage costs were about $25 per pallet per month, with the average evicted family needing 4 pallets. The storage company would dump possessions if a storage bill was 90 days overdue.
- Around 70% of lots confiscated in evictions or foreclosures resulted in possessions being lost.
- Job losses could cause evictions, but evictions could also cause job losses. An evicted worker is roughly 15% more likely to lose their job. Evictions take up a worker’s time and also weigh heavily on their minds, making it easier to make mistakes on a job. Workers would also often have to move further away from their place of work, increasing their likelihood of being late or missing days.
- It could take an extremely long time to find another rental with an eviction record, and on a tight budget:
- Pam and Ned find a place after calling on 38 apartments. They are soon evicted again, but find another place very quickly when Ned applies by himself, leaving Pam and her two kids off the lease.
- Larraine had applied or called on 40 apartments.
- Crystal and Vanetta find a place after trying for 73 places.
- Arleen finds a place after trying 90 places, around 2 months after her eviction hearing. But she is evicted again soon after Jori kicks a teacher in the shin and the police follow him home.
- Evictions could cause kids to switch schools frequently, and even miss school. Jori, for example, had attended 5 different schools between 7th and 8th grade.
- Housing Authorities often count evictions against people when reviewing applications, so an eviction can cause people to lose out on public housing.
- Families experience 20% higher levels of material hardship (e.g. going without food, medical care, electricity, etc) in the year after an eviction. They continue to have higher levels of material hardship for at least 2 years after the eviction.
- About half of recently evicted mothers experience multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar non-evicted mothers.
Welfare
- Some people manage the finances of SSI beneficiaries for a fee.
- The manager pays the beneficiary’s rent, utilities and food expenses first. Such managers can help beneficiaries find places to live, as landlords know they’ll pay their rent.
- Belinda is one such manager in the book. She estimates that rent payments made up between 60-70% of her typical client’s income.
- Belinda charges $37 a month for her services, and had 230 clients at the time.
- Waits in the welfare building could take a very long time. In the book, Larraine waits for 1 hour 40 minutes in the building, though she claims to have spent “entire days” waiting before. Whenever she tried to call ahead, she only got a busy signal.
- People could have their food stamps and benefits reduced or cut off as a “sanction” for missing appointments with their welfare caseworkers. However, housing insecurity made it easy to miss an appointment, as reminder notices often went to outdated addresses.
- If people had more than $2,000 in the bank, their benefits could get cut. This acted as a disincentive to save. Larraine, for example, saw putting things on layaway as saving.
Housing programs
- The two main programs in Milwaukee for people facing eviction were Emergency Assistance and the Homelessness Prevention Program. But those programs were designed for people experiencing a temporary loss in income, rather than the chronically poor.
- Housing assistance is also commonly denied to people with an eviction record – but court records could be wrong.
- Most poor renters receive no federal housing assistance, based on 2013 figures:
- 1% of poor renters lived in rent-controlled units;
- 15% lived in public housing;
- 17% received a government subsidy (usually a housing voucher); and
- The remaining 67% received nothing.
- The US spends far more in tax benefits for relatively affluent homeowners than it does on housing assistance for the poor:
- In 2008, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totalled less than $40.2 billion. Homeowner tax benefits in the same year exceeded $171 billion.
Public housing
- Public housing residents generally only had to pay 30% of their income on rent,.
- Around 1.2 million families in America live in public housing today.
- One day, when Arleen asks the Housing Authority about the public housing waiting list, she finds out that there are over 3,500 families on it who had applied 4 years earlier. In larger cities like Washington DC, wait-times for public housing are counted in decades, rather than years.
- 3 in 4 families who qualified for housing assistance received nothing.
- Most of the properties were reserved for the physically disabled or elderly. Elderly housing was more politically popular, since people were more sympathetic to old people and it provided adult children with an alternative to a nursing home. Larraine had never thought to apply for public housing because even senior citizens often struggled to get it.
- In the past, America undertook high-rise public housing projects to replace slums. But the high-rises often became slums themselves. For example, St Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe Towers were demolished only 18 years after the first residents moved in. Desmond attributes this to politicians cutting off funding, causing public housing to fall into disrepair. [Would have been good to delve into this further. Presumably the main costs of public housing (e.g. acquiring the land, building the towers) would be incurred upfront, so maintenance costs shouldn’t have been that high relative to the overall costs. So why exactly did funding decline and by how much? Were maintenance costs more or less than expected at the start of the projects? Were the costs equivalent to similar private apartment blocks or were they higher for some reason? How long before the apartments became slums? Did the affordable public housing help residents get on their feet before they descended into slums?]
Housing vouchers
- Today, the federal Housing Choice Voucher Program helps tenants pay for housing in the private rental market. It serves over 2.1 million households and is the largest housing subsidy program for low-income families in the US.
- A tenant with a housing voucher only had to pay a small portion of the rent – 30% of their income – with the government funding the rest.
- The Department of Housing and Urban Development sets the Fair Market Rent (FMR), which is the amount a landlord can charge a voucher holder.
- FMRs were calculated at the municipal level. Because rents were higher in the suburbs than in the inner city, the FMR exceeded market rent in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
- If a voucher holder lived in one of those neighbourhoods, their landlord could therefore charge an above-market rent. The tenant would be indifferent since the amount they pay is based on their income anyway.
- Desmond notes that this practice of overcharging voucher holders cost taxpayers $3.6 million per year in Milwaukee alone.
- Housing vouchers made up only 6% of renters in the city.
- Some landlords would refuse to accept voucher holders because their properties would have to meet a higher standard.
- The idea of a voucher program started out as a “rent certificate program” in the 1930s. It was the landlords and realtors who lobbied for it, because they saw public housing programs as threats to their profits. Other groups, including civil rights activists, also joined in, thinking that vouchers would help reduce racial segregation.
Social attitudes
- At least in the trailer park, residents thought evictions were deserved, and the result of individual failure. Desmond writes, “No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.”
- For the most part, tenants had a high tolerance for inequality. They rarely questioned why they were so poor while their landlords were rich. Instead, they focused on smaller, more tangible problems. Most renters in Milwaukee thought highly of their landlord.
- In the past, tenants felt like they belonged, and fought for their rights. Not so much today.
- In the early 20th century, tenants banded together to protest against evictions and unsanitary convictions.
- Tenants even organised rent strikes when they felt landlords raised rents too much. The rent controls in New York today came about from the rent wars in the 1920s.
- Today, most residents in the trailer park wanted to leave it. They didn’t plan on staying and changing things. Some residents would say they were just “passing through”, even if they’d been there almost all their life. People saw their neighbourhoods as hopeless.
- Desmond believes that poverty causes people to make poor financial decisions. He thinks there is good reason to expect people would make better financial decisions if they had a real opportunity to break out of poverty.
- For example, a study found that almost 40% of parents who received an Earned Income Tax Credit of more than $1,000 saved a considerable portion of their refund. Almost 85% used the refund to pay off debt.
- Both white people and black people had strong aversions to living in black neighbourhoods. When black renters move to an “integrated neighbourhood”, they do so to get away from the majority-black communities rather than to move towards integration.
- Even when people have social ties to the middle class, they may not be able to call on them – or only in extreme emergencies. For example, Scott stayed in touch with his middle class connections, but only by hiding his addiction and poverty, so he didn’t feel he could call on any favours.
Nuisance Laws
- Nuisance property ordinances could cause grossly unfair evictions. The laws allowed police to penalise landlords for their tenants’ behaviour. Police would designate certain properties “nuisances” if they received an excessive number of 911 calls relating to it. Landlords could be fined up to $5,000 or even put in jail.
- These ordinances emerged in the last decades of the 20th century. The idea was that they could save money and conserve police resources by getting property owners to take care with nuisances themselves.
- In most cases (83%), landlords who received a nuisance citation for domestic violence responded by either evicting the tenants or threatening to evict them for future police calls. Other landlords respond by discouraging tenants from calling 911.
- In the book, Sherrena evicts Arleen and Crystal after Crystal calls the police to report domestic violence happening in one of Sherrena’s neighbouring units. (This was not the official grounds for the eviction, but was what prompted it.)
- Desmond notes that in the year the police called Sherrena, more than one victim per week was murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. Milwaukee’s police chief appeared on the news, puzzling over the fact that so many victims never contacted the police for help.
- Milwaukee amended its ordinance in 2011, after Desmond released his findings. Domestic abuse, sexual assault and stalking are no longer “nuisances”.
Possible solutions
Publicly fund legal services for low-income families in housing courts
- Desmond argues that this would enable tenants to report dangerous or illegal conditions with fear of retaliation.
- Lawyers could better make tenants’ cases for them, and tenants would not have to take time off work or childcare to attend court.
- Between 2005 and 2008, a program in the South Bronx provided more than 1,300 families with legal assistance and prevented eviction in an incredible 86% of cases. It cost more than $450,000 but saved New York City more than $700,000 in estimated shelter costs alone.
Limiting access to court records
- The threat of an eviction record often cows tenants into forfeiting their legal rights and just moving out.
- Some people argue that we need accessible court records to promote a “free and open society”. They argue that limiting access to such records would allow undemocratic state practices to flourish (e.g. secret police, undocumented arrests). However, Desmond readily dismisses these concerns as being “abstract” and “grossly out of touch”. [I think it’s possible to keep eviction records but limit access to them. For example, a court could make anonymised aggregate records publicly available, but require people to apply to the court and show some “legitimate interest” (over and above a regular background check) to access records that would identify a tenant. Alternatively, limit access to records of “no cause” evictions or evictions for failure to pay rent, but allow access to records of evictions involving serious property damage (e.g. over $10,000 worth) or violence. These could better balance tenants’ privacy rights with competing interests.]
Expand the housing voucher program to cover all low-income families
- Desmond suggests this as a way to balance a landlord’s freedom to profit from rents and a tenant’s freedom to live in a safe and affordable home. While Desmond notes the end that a universal voucher program is “but one potential policy recommendation” and that there are other ways to establish the basic right to housing, this is the option he focuses on.
- The idea is that every family below a certain income level would be eligible for a housing voucher. They could use that voucher to choose where they want to live, within reason (e.g. it can’t be too big and expensive, nor too shabby and run-down). The family would dedicate 30% of their income to housing costs, with the voucher (government) paying the rest. [I see no need to restrict people from living in housing that the government deems “too shabby”. If the voucher meant that tenants had to pay a fixed percentage of their income, with the government funding the rest, they would have no incentive to choose “shabby” housing over nicer housing anyway. The Hickstons’ housing woes started when a building inspector forced their landlord to evict them. Something similar with Arleen. Both of them may have been better off if they had been able to stay in their original housing. In fact, Desmond later writes in a footnote that countries with universal housing programs do not have minimum housing standards like America’s limited voucher program does, because when everyone can afford decent housing, empowered renters can just take their voucher elsewhere.]
- Desmond thinks that vouchers would be more cost-effective than public housing or subsidising private development. He says, “We can’t build our way out” and worries that public housing risks repeating the failures of the past. [This is unconvincing. It’s probably true that building enough public housing to cover all low-income families would be much more expensive than expanding the voucher program (at least in the short run; a housing voucher program could be more expensive in the long run if both rents and the income thresholds keep increasing). That’s because building public housing would actually increase housing supply. If the underlying problem is lack of supply, then housing vouchers would do nothing to fix it unless it indirectly incentivises construction by pushing rents up.]
- Desmond also asserts that discrimination against voucher holders should be illegal, else landlords – particularly those in prosperous areas – may simply refuse to house them, consigning voucher holders to certain landlords who own property in certain neighbourhoods. [It seems unlikely this law would be very effective in practice, due to difficulties in enforcement. As Desmond points out, discrimination on basis of race is already illegal, yet I’m sure black renters have a much harder time renting a property in certain areas than white renters, even after controlling for income and other factors. That being said, I doubt many landlords would want to discriminate against someone solely because they were a voucher holder anyway (unless the voucher came with a condition that the property couldn’t be “too shabby”). They may well discriminate based on other things that correlate to holding a voucher (such as race, income, having kids), but not on the basis of the voucher itself. Why would they? It’s just a more reliable source of increased income.]
- In 2013, the Bipartisan Policy Center estimated that expanding housing vouchers to all renting families below the 30th percentile in median income for their area would require an additional $22.5 billion increasing total spending on housing assistance to around $60 billion.
Objections to an expanded voucher program
- One concern is that voucher programs may be driving up rents (generally, not just voucher holders’ rents):
- Desmond notes this concern, but says that the evidence for this – based on the current voucher program – is thin. [That’s probably because the current voucher program covers only a small percentage of renters, which won’t move the market that much. If the program were expanded to cover all low-income renters, you would likely see a much clearer effect.]
- He also notes that one study found that cities with more housing vouchers experienced steeper rent hikes and that, on the whole, vouchers have cost unassisted families more than they have saved assisted ones. [This is a very important concern, but Desmond buries it in a footnote!]
- However, there have also been studies that found no relationship between the concentration of voucher holders and the overall price of rental housing. Desmond refers to a study of the Experimental Housing Allowance Program (EHAP). He notes that William Apgar, an American economist who served as the US Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, attributes this to the fact that the vouchers did not sufficiently saturate the market and rents were artificially depressed during the study’s time period. [Exactly my point above. But if the voucher program were greatly expanded – as Desmond advocates – it’s likely to raise rents generally.]
- Desmond seems to recognise there is some validity to these concerns, as he states that costs would need to be regulated to make the housing program as efficient as possible. Currently, he thinks the Housing Choice Voucher Program likely costs billions of dollars more than it should.
Expanding housing vouchers without stabilizing rent would be asking taxpayers to subsidize landlords’ profits. Today, landlords overcharge voucher holders simply because they can.
- Desmond believes that the program could employ algorithms and other tools commonly used in the private market to prevent landlords from charging too much and families from selecting more housing than they need. [This seems overoptimistic and a bit naïve. Desmond is pretty hand-wavey about how this would actually work – he cites some papers mentioning rent control but the problems with such controls are well-documented. Moreover, if the voucher program covered all low-income families, it would inevitably distort the private rental market. Rents would likely increase across the board, making it hard for any algorithm or other tool to identify when a landlord is charging “too much”. It’s also likely that middle-income families just above the eligibility threshold for the voucher program would then be the ones to struggle to pay those higher rents, which would create pressure to keep increasing the income threshold. ]
- Some people suggest that a universal housing program might be a disincentive to work. Desmond acknowledges that one study has shown that housing assistance leads to a modest reduction in work hours and earnings, but states that other studies have found no effect.
The conclusion
Desmond’s overall point is that people need a stable home before they can better themselves, their families and their communities.
[Home] is refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets. We say that at home, we can ‘be ourselves’. Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home, we remove our masks.
Renters without stable housing spend a lot of time and emotional energy finding ways to pay their rent, deal with evictions and find places to live – time and energy that they could instead spend enriching their lives. For example, once Scott gets an affordable apartment, he is able to remain sober and find decent work. Similarly, once the Hickstons move to a decent 3-bedroom place, Patrice is able to earn her GED and take community college courses.
Evictions undermine housing stability and affect the lives of many poor families. But academics and policymakers have neglected evictions for years.
Other Interesting Points
- Evictions spiked in the summer because there was a moratorium on electricity disconnections in the winter. So tenants would pay their landlord instead of their electricity bill over the winter, but would have to pay back their utility company come summer.
- In Milwaukee, people could sell $100 of food stamps for $50 cash.
- When people were evicted from the trailer park, they usually left their trailers behind. Towing expenses exceeded $1,500 and it could cost even more to set up the trailer elsewhere. Tobin would reclaim the trailers as “abandoned property” and give them to new tenants as a “Handyman Special”.
- Sherrena was able to buy a large, 4-bedroom, good quality property in the inner city for less than $17,000. She had purchased other lower-quality properties for less – as little as $5,000. [I know this was just after the GFC, but these prices are simply astounding to me. I didn’t think properties in a reasonable-sized city had been this cheap since the 1970s!]
- At one point, Tobin pays one of the trailer park residents, Mrs Mytes, to clean out a particularly messy trailer. The job takes her 5 straight hours, and she only earns $20 for it.
- Low-income people may sometimes have a large TV or expensive new shoes, but they probably won’t have paid full price for them. Poor people often know of ways to get things cheaper.
- If a poor father failed his family, he could leave them and try again at some point down the road. Poor mothers usually had to live with their failure.
- Mothers who experience severe levels of economic deprivation hit and scold their children more frequently, give fewer hugs and are generally less supportive. The standard explanation is that poverty causes people to become more irritable, depressed and anxious. That in turn increases their tendency to be punitive and less supportive.
- Only 15% of black renters looking for housing used the Internet, compared to about half of white renters. Black renters still relied heavily on physical “FOR RENT” signs.
- Methadone is highly effective at treating heroin addiction. If the dose is right, it can feed an addict’s cravings and allow them to function without impairment.
My Thoughts
Evicted is a book that draws attention to the prevalence of evictions (both formal and informal ones), and the difficulties they cause for evictees. Desmond’s approach of interspersing narrative accounts of evictees’ lives with facts and statistics about housing in America more generally is very effective. He manages to illustrate on a human level the struggles faced by families and individuals in making rent each month and finding suitable places to live. And he “zooms out” at appropriate points, explaining how those struggles tie in with broader systemic issues.
One quibble I have is that Desmond puts a lot of content in footnotes. Often footnotes contained interesting and important information, and sometimes took up an entire page (at least on my e-reader). Perhaps he thought his readers just wanted to hear about the people in the book and didn’t care about facts and statistics. For me at least, that wasn’t the case.
Where Evicted does fall down is in its analysis and policy recommendations. Although Desmond is competent at highlighting issues of eviction and poverty, he is not so good at critical analysis. For example, at one point 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.
This doesn’t make any sense because it ignores imputed rent. I can understand that landlording in a poor, black neighborhood is lucrative, but homeownership would be equally lucrative. A homeowner’s imputed rental return would be the same as the landlord’s rental return. It would be even higher, in fact, because (1) a homeowner wouldn’t incur the high costs of eviction and rent defaults that a landlord would; and (2) imputed rent is not taxed whereas a landlord’s rental income is.
Shortly after, Desmond says:
Sherrena estimated her net worth at around $2 million, but equity was icing on the cake. The real money was made in rents. Every month Sherrena collected roughly $20,000 in rent. Her monthly mortgage bills rounded out to $8,500. After paying the water bill, Sherrena—who owned three dozen inner-city units, all filled with tenants around or below the poverty line—figured she netted roughly $10,000 a month …
Even if Sherrena’s main motivation wasn’t capital gains, she was still making a lot of them. Based on these figures, Sherrena netted $120,000 per year before taxes. Earlier, Desmond tells us that Sherrena first bought a home in 1999 and bought her first rental property soon after. So she’d been a landlord for about 10 years. To get to $2 million on rents alone would have probably taken Sherrena over 20 years, since she also had to pay taxes and living expenses. It may well have taken even longer, as Sherrena had to build up her portfolio and did not net anything close to $10,000 a month at the start. This back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that Sherrena likely made over half her wealth through capital gains. So the statement that “The real money was made in rents” is wrong.
Desmond only brings up policy recommendations at the very end. My objections to his recommendations are detailed above and, frankly, I think Evicted would have been a better book without any policy recommendations at all. It is clear that Desmond did not spend anywhere near as much time and energy on developing his policy analysis as he did on understanding how the people in the book lived.
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What did you think of Evicted? Am I being too harsh on Desmond? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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