Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,136

place in predominantly black neighborhoods. Within those neighborhoods women are more than twice as likely to be evicted as men.11

Last, I designed another survey that would help me understand why certain people escaped eviction while others did not. The Milwaukee Eviction Court Study was an in-person survey of 250 tenants appearing in eviction court over a six-week period in January and February 2011 (66 percent response rate). These interviews, conducted immediately after tenants’ court hearings, provided a snapshot into Milwaukee’s evicted population. The data show that the median age of a tenant in Milwaukee’s eviction court was thirty-three. The youngest was nineteen; the oldest, sixty-nine. The median monthly household income of tenants in eviction court was $935, and the median amount of back rent owed was about that much. The eviction court survey also showed that much more than rental debt separates the evicted from the almost evicted. When I analyzed these data, I found that even after accounting for how much the tenant owed the landlord—and other factors like household income and race—the presence of children in the household almost tripled a tenant’s odds of receiving an eviction judgment. The effect of living with children on receiving an eviction judgment was equivalent to falling four months behind in rent.12

The multiple methods and different data sources used in this book informed one another in important ways. I began this project with a set of questions to pursue, but lines of inquiry flexed and waned as my fieldwork progressed. Some would not have sprung to mind had I never set foot in the field. But it was only after analyzing court records and survey data that I was able to see the bigger picture, grasping the magnitude of eviction in poor neighborhoods, identifying disparities, and cataloguing consequences of displacement. My quantitative endeavors also allowed me to assess how representative my observations were. Whenever possible, I subjected my ground-level observations to a kind of statistical check, which determined whether what I was seeing on the ground was also detectable within a larger population. When an idea was clarified or refined by aggregate comparisons, I would return to my field notes to identify the mechanisms behind the numbers. Working in concert with one another, each method enriched the others. And each kept the others honest.

In addition to the larger endeavors—conducting original surveys and analyzing big data from court records—I also sought out a wide variety of evidence to bolster the validity of my observations and deepen my understanding of the issues. I analyzed two years’ worth of nuisance property citations from the Milwaukee Police Department; obtained records of more than a million 911 calls in Milwaukee; and collected rent rolls, legal transcripts, public property records, school files, and psychological evaluations.

Together, these combined data sources provide a new portrait of the powerful ways the private housing sector is shaping the lives of poor American families and their communities. They have shown that problems endemic to poverty—residential instability, severe deprivation, concentrated neighborhood disadvantage, health disparities, even joblessness—stem from the lack of affordable housing in our cities. I have made all survey data publicly available through the Harvard Dataverse Network.13

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This book is based in Milwaukee. Wisconsin’s largest city is not every city, but it is considerably less unique than the small clutch of iconic but exceptional places that have come to represent the American urban experience. Every city creates its own ecosystem, but in some cities this is much more pronounced. Milwaukee is a fairly typical midsize metropolitan area with a fairly typical socioeconomic profile and housing market and fairly typical renter protections.14 It is far better suited to represent the experiences of city dwellers living in Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Baltimore, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Gary, Raleigh, Utica, and other cities left out of the national conversation because they are not America’s biggest successes (San Francisco, New York City) or biggest failures (Detroit, Newark).

That said, it is ultimately up to future researchers to determine whether what I found in Milwaukee is true in other places. A thousand questions remain unanswered. We need a robust sociology of housing that reaches beyond a narrow focus on policy and public housing. We need a new sociology of displacement that documents the prevalence, causes, and consequences of eviction. And perhaps most important, we need a committed sociology of inequality that includes a serious study of exploitation and extractive markets.

Still, I wonder sometimes what we are asking when we ask if findings apply elsewhere. Is it that we really believe that something could