Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,144
There were roughly 105,000 renter households in the city. See Georgia Pabst, “Waiting Lists Soar for Public Housing, Rent Assistance,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 10, 2013.
3. Adrianne Todman, “Public Housing Did Not Fail and the Role It Must Play in Interrupting Poverty,” Harvard University, Inequality and Social Policy Seminar, March 24, 2014.
4. To make matters worse for the very poor, the shortfall of federal housing assistance has coincided with the emergence of an employment-based safety net, which directs aid to working families through programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit or public housing reserved for parents with low-wage jobs. The result is that families just above and below the poverty line receive significantly more help today than they did twenty years ago, but those far below the poverty line receive significantly less. For families living in deep poverty, both income and housing assistance have been scaled back. On spending patterns, see Janet Currie, The Invisible Safety Net: Protecting the Nation’s Poor Children and Families (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Robert Moffitt, “The Deserving Poor, the Family, and the US Welfare System,” Demography 52 (2015): 729–49. On the gap between housing assistance and need, see Danilo Pelletiere, Michelle Canizio, Morgan Hargrave, and Sheila Crowley, Housing Assistance for Low Income Households: States Do Not Fill the Gap (Washington, DC: National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2008); Douglas Rice and Barbara Sar, Decade of Neglect Has Weakened Federal Low-Income Programs: New Resources Required to Meet Growing Needs (Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2009).
5. I did not personally witness this event. The scene was reconstructed through interviews with Arleen and Trisha.
6. The Milwaukee Housing Authority’s general-occupancy list for merely poor families seeking assistance was closed and backlogged, but its lists for elderly low-income adults as well as those with disabilities were kept continuously open. The Housing Authority may deny even these applicants for any number of reasons, however, including if they have a criminal record, a drug problem, or a history of missing rent payments. Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, Admissions and Continued Occupancy Policy (ACOP), October 2013, Section 7.4: “Grounds for Denial.”
7. As state services for the needy have been scaled back, social service agencies, like Belinda’s, have sprung up in poor neighborhoods across the nation to fill the void. Some are nonprofits; others are business ventures. Lester Salamon, “The Rise of the Nonprofit Sector,” Foreign Affairs 73 (1994): 111–24, 109; John McKnight, The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Jennifer Wolch, The Shadow State: Government and Voluntary Sector in Transition (New York: The Foundation Center, 1990). Urban ethnographies published during the 1960s and 1970s are striking in their lack of references to social service agencies. After reading these accounts, one cannot but arrive at the conclusion that social workers were not a major force in the lives of the urban poor fifty years ago. Carol Stack’s All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974) mentions but a single social worker and says almost nothing about child welfare services or similar agencies. And there are no job centers or employment counselors milling around Tally’s Corner, which Liebow published in 1967, a book (mainly) about unemployed black men. See Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967).
8. When lawmakers reformed welfare, they required states to develop sanctions for TANF recipients, procedures that involved suspending all or some of their benefit if recipients were found to be noncompliant. When W-2 began in Wisconsin, nearly two-thirds of those who entered the program were sanctioned at some point during the first four years. Chi-Fang Wu, Maria Cancian, Daniel Meyer, and Geoffrey Wallace, “How Do Welfare Sanctions Work?,” Social Work Research 30 (2006): 33–50; Matthew Fellowes and Gretchen Rowe, “Politics and the New American Welfare States,” American Journal of Political Science 48 (2004): 362–73; Richard Fording, Joe Soss, and Sanford Schram, “Race and the Local Politics of Punishment in the New World of Welfare,” American Journal of Sociology 116 (2011): 1610–57.
6. RAT HOLE
1. For the full models and methodology, see Matthew Desmond, Carl Gershenson, and Barbara Kiviat, “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters,” Social Service Review 89 (2015): 227–62. Tenants represented in the Milwaukee Area Renters Study were classified as having experienced long-term housing problems if they suffered any of the following issues the year prior to being interviewed: (a) a broken stove or other appliance, (b) a broken window, (c) a