Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,124

would curb frivolous evictions and unchecked abuses and help prevent tenants from signing bad stipulations. If it weren’t so easy to evict someone, tenants like Doreen and Patrice could report dangerous or illegal conditions without fearing retaliation. If tenants had lawyers, they wouldn’t need to go to court. They could go to work or stay home with their children while their attorney made their case. And their case would actually be made.

Courts have shown little interest in addressing the fact that the majority of tenants facing eviction never show up. If anything, they have come to depend on this because each day brings a pile of eviction cases, and the goal of every person working in housing court, no matter where their sympathies lie, is just to get through the pile because the next day another pile will be there waiting. The principle of due process has been replaced by mere process: pushing cases through. Tenant lawyers would change that. This would cost money, not only in attorney salaries, but also in the hiring of more commissioners, judges, and clerks to handle the business of justice. Every housing court would need to be adequately funded so that it could function like a court, instead of an eviction assembly line: stamp, stamp, stamp.

It would be a worthwhile investment in our cities and children. Directing aid upstream in the form of a few hours of legal services could lower costs downstream. For example, a program that ran from 2005 to 2008 in the South Bronx provided more than 1,300 families with legal assistance and prevented eviction in 86 percent of cases. It cost around $450,000, but saved New York City more than $700,000 in estimated shelter costs alone.37 The consequences of eviction are many—and so are its burdens on the public purse.38

The right to counsel in civil matters has been established around the world: not just in France and Sweden but also in Azerbaijan, India, Zambia, and many other countries we like to think of as less progressive than our own.39 If America extended the right to counsel in housing court, it would be a major step on the path to a more fair and equitable society. But it would not address the underlying source of America’s eviction epidemic: the rapidly shrinking supply of affordable housing.

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If we acknowledge that housing is a basic right of all Americans, then we must think differently about another right: the right to make as much money as possible by providing families with housing—and especially to profit excessively from the less fortunate. Since the founding of this country, a long line of American visionaries have called for a more balanced relationship, one that protects people from the profit motive, “not to destroy individualism,” in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words, “but to protect it.”40 Child labor laws, the minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, and other protections we now take for granted came about when we chose to place the well-being of people above money.

There are losers and winners. There are losers because there are winners. “Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.”41

Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.42 It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets. Boosting poor people’s incomes by increasing the minimum wage or public benefits, say, is absolutely crucial. But not all of those extra dollars will stay in the pockets of the poor. Wage hikes are tempered if rents rise along with them, just as food stamps are worth less if groceries in the inner city cost more—and they do, as much as 40 percent more, by one estimate.43 Poverty is two-faced—a matter of income and expenses, input and output—and in a world of exploitation, it will not be effectively ameliorated if we ignore this plain fact.

History testifies to this point. When the American labor movement rose up in the 1830s to demand higher wages, landed capital did not lock arms with industrial capital. Instead landlords rooted for the workers because higher wages would allow them to collect higher rents. History repeated itself 100 years later, when wage gains that workers had made through labor strikes were quickly absorbed by rising rents. In the interwar years, the industrial job market expanded, but the housing market, especially for blacks, did not, allowing landlords