Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,141
poor housing conditions] would be excluded from this figure. The 5.5 percent estimate is based on all reasons given for moving, which may double-count some renters who report multiple kinds of forced moves. The most appropriate measure, therefore, is somewhere between the two point estimates.) According to the Milwaukee Area Renters Study (2009–2011), 10.8 percent of the most recent moves of renters who had moved within the previous year were forced. My estimate is larger—and more accurate—because MARS captured informal evictions. When informal evictions were excluded, my estimate drops to 3 percent, which aligns with the AHS estimate. The AHS, along with most material-hardship studies, significantly underestimates the prevalence of involuntary removal among renters by relying on open-ended questions that do not adequately capture informal evictions that many renters do not consider to be “evictions.”
5. The national estimates about the proportion of poor renting families being unable to pay all of their rent and believing they soon would be evicted come from the American Housing Survey, 2013, Table S-08-RO, which also reported that over 2.8 million renting households in the US believed it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that they would be evicted within the next two months. Chester Hartman and David Robinson (“Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem,” Housing Policy Debate 14 [2003]: 461–501, 461) estimate that the number of Americans evicted every year “is likely in the many millions.” See also Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997), 53.
With respect to statewide eviction estimates: The Neighborhood Law Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School has begun to record state-level eviction filings. (Eviction filings [being called to eviction court] are different from eviction judgments [being ordered to move out by court order]. In all cities, there are more filings than judgments. My estimate of Milwaukee’s formal, court-ordered eviction rate is based on judgments, which is a much harder metric to obtain and validate in other cities.) In 2012, the numbers broke down like this: Alabama, 22,824 evictions filed in court (pop. 4.8 million); Minnesota, 22,165 evictions filed in court (pop. 5.4 million); Oregon, 23,452 evictions filed in court (pop. 3.9 million); Washington, 18,060 evictions filed in court (pop. 6.9 million); Wisconsin, 28,533 evictions filed in court (pop. 5.7 million). See the epilogue for eviction estimates in cities other than Milwaukee. On measuring involuntary displacement, see Desmond and Shollenberger, “Forced Displacement from Rental Housing”; Hartman and Robinson, “Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem.”
1. THE BUSINESS OF OWNING THE CITY
1. The median annual household income among Milwaukee renters is $30,398, almost $5,500 lower than that of the city’s overall population. See Nicolas Retsinas and Eric Belsky, Revisiting Rental Housing (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press and the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2008).
2. Where you bought in the city depended on who you were, especially when it came to race. Milwaukee landlords were more likely than not to share their tenants’ racial or ethnic identity. Most white tenants in the city (87 percent) rented from white landlords; and most black tenants (51 percent) rented from black landlords. Overall, the majority of tenants in Milwaukee (63 percent) rented from a white landlord. But almost 1 in 5 rented from a black landlord, while almost 1 in 9 rented from a Hispanic landlord.
Among Hispanic renters, roughly half rented from Hispanic landlords and half from white landlords, and 41 percent of Hispanic renters in Milwaukee believed their landlord was born outside the United States. Landlording had long been a way for immigrants to break into the American middle class. In the early twentieth century, Polish immigrants in Milwaukee took to jacking up their houses, building basement apartments, and renting them out. As the South Side of Milwaukee transitioned from Polish to Hispanic, immigrants from Mexico and Puerto Rico became the ones renting out those “Polish Flats.” See John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee, 3rd ed. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2008 [1999]), 173.
Unlike in past decades, when the typical inner-city landlord was white, the deeper you went into the inner city, the more likely it became that your landlord was black: in neighborhoods where at least two-thirds of the residents were African American, 3 in 4 renters had a black landlord. On white landlords in black neighborhoods in past eras, see St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1945), 718.