Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,135

wanting to spend all my time with landlords and tenants on the ground. But when my questions didn’t go away, I set out to gather the data myself. I began by designing a survey of tenants in Milwaukee’s private housing sector. The survey began small, but with the support of the MacArthur Foundation it grew into something more. I called it the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, MARS for short. From 2009 to 2011, roughly 1,100 tenants were interviewed in their homes by professional interviewers trained and supervised by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, which reported to me. To facilitate estimates generalizable to Milwaukee’s entire rental population, households from across the city were interviewed. Clipboards and portable Lenovo ThinkPad computers in hand, interviewers ventured into some of the city’s worst neighborhoods. One was bitten by a dog and, later, mugged.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of the Survey Center, MARS had an extraordinarily high response rate for a survey of such a highly mobile and poor population (84 percent). What I was learning during my fieldwork deeply informed MARS’s 250 questions: not only what I asked but how I asked it. For example, when I was living in the trailer park, I learned that asking why someone moved was no simple task. Tenants often provided an explanation for a move that maximized their own volition. And asking about involuntary mobility, for its part, came with its own set of complications, as tenants tended to have strict conceptions of eviction. Take Rose and Tim, my neighbors in the trailer park. Rose and Tim were forced to leave their trailer after Tim sustained a back injury at work. They did not go to court but undeniably were evicted. (Their names appear in the eviction records.) Nevertheless, they didn’t see things this way. “When you say ‘eviction,’ ” Rose explained, “I think of the sheriffs coming and throwing you out and changing your locks, and Eagle Movers tosses your stuff on the curb. That’s an eviction. We were not evicted.” If Rose and Tim had been asked during a survey, “Have you ever been evicted?,” they would have answered no. Accordingly, surveys that have posed this question vastly underestimate the prevalence of involuntary removal from housing. I learned to ask the question differently, in light of tenants’ understanding of the matter, and designed the survey accordingly.

MARS collected new data on housing, residential mobility, eviction, and urban poverty. These data provide the only comprehensive estimate of the frequency of involuntary displacement from housing among urban renters. When I ran the numbers, I was shocked to discover that 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced at least one forced move—formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation—in the two years prior to being surveyed.

The survey also showed that nearly half of those forced moves (48 percent) were informal evictions: off-the-books displacements not processed through the court, as when a landlord pays you to leave or hires a couple of heavies to throw you out. Formal eviction was less common, constituting 24 percent of forced moves. An additional 23 percent of forced moves were due to landlord foreclosure, with building condemnations accounting for the remaining 5 percent.10

In other words, for every eviction executed through the judicial system, there are two others executed beyond the purview of the court, without any form of due process. This means that estimates that do not account for informal evictions downplay the crisis in our cities. If public attention and resources are a product of how widespread policymakers think a problem is, then studies that produce artificially low eviction rates are not just wrong; they’re harmful.

Some of the most important findings to come out of the Milwaukee Area Renters Study have to do with eviction’s fallout. The data linked eviction to heightened residential instability, substandard housing, declines in neighborhood quality, and even job loss. These findings led me to analyze the consequences of eviction in a national-representative data set (the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study), which showed that evicted mothers suffer from increased material hardship as well as poor physical and mental health.

The prevalence of informal eviction notwithstanding, you can still learn something from eviction court records. They provide an accurate measure of the frequency and location of formal evictions in the city. So I extracted records for all eviction cases that took place in Milwaukee between 2003 and 2013, hundreds of thousands of them. According to these official records, each year almost half of all formal, court-ordered evictions in Milwaukee take