market surveys. “You call nearby complexes and check out what their rental rates are to make sure you are not too high and not too low,” writes Bryan Chavis in Buy It, Rent It, Profit! Make Money as a Landlord in Any Real Estate Market (New York: Touchstone, 2009), 51. Picking up the phone was an extra measure, since several websites stood ready to report whether an apartment was above or below rent in the surrounding area (rentometer).
10. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011; merged with neighborhood-level data from the American Community Survey (2006–2010) and Milwaukee Police Department crime records (2009–2011). Consider one other statistic: the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $575 in Milwaukee’s most dangerous neighborhoods (those at or above the 75th percentile in violent crime rate) and $600 in its least dangerous (those at or below the 25th percentile in violent crime rate).
11. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 11; Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 24–26; Joe William Trotter Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 179; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 54; Marcus Anthony Hunter, Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 80.
12. According to the Community Advocates rent abatement guidelines at the time of this fieldwork, a tenant could withhold 5 percent for no door or if the apartment was infested with roaches; 10 percent for a broken toilet; and 25 percent for no heat.
13. Landlords with vacant units could lower their rent, but some would prefer the vacancy. Sherrena once showed a prospective tenant, a truck driver, a ground-floor unit in a four-family complex. It had sat empty for two months. The man looked at the patches of carpet a dog had mangled, fingered the unhinged cupboards, squeaked his shoe on the grimy kitchen floor. “This just isn’t the kind of living I’m used to,” he said. “How about $380?”
“No way,” Sherrena responded, offended.
Collecting $380 would have been better than collecting nothing for that particular unit—but not if it meant that rent for everyone else in the building would drop. The three other units in the complex were occupied with tenants paying $600 a month. If Sherrena took the truck driver’s deal, the other tenants would learn about it and likely demand a similar rate. If she allowed it, her take-home would be less than it was renting three units at $600. If she refused, some tenants might leave, causing more vacancies. Sherrena showed the truck driver out and locked the door behind him.
14. Forty-four percent, to be exact. Serious and lasting housing problems are defined above (chapter 6, note 1). Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.
15. Comparing two-bedroom units in the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. In the 1970s and 1980s, rents increased primarily because housing quality did; see Christopher Jencks, The Homeless (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 84–89. But since then, housing quality across America had remained virtually unchanged—if anything, the 2000s saw small declines in quality nationwide—while rents shot up. According to the American Housing Survey, there were approximately 909,000 renter-occupied units with severe physical problems in 1993. That number increased to 1.2 million by 2011. The proportion of all rental households with severe physical problems has remained flat over the last two decades (at roughly 3 percent). The same is true for other measures of housing quality. For example, in 1993, 9 percent of renters reported being “uncomfortably cold for 24 hours or more” because the heating broke. In 2011, 10 percent did. During the 2000s, rental housing across America did not undergo drastic improvements that kept pace with rent increases.
16. When those properties stopped cashing out, because they amassed too many fines or required costly repairs, Sherrena would “let ’em go back to the city.” This meant she would simply stop paying taxes on those properties until the city eventually took control of them through tax foreclosures. Sherrena shielded herself from any personal liability by registering each of her properties under a different Limited Liability Company (LLC). In the eyes of the law, it was the company, not Sherrena, that defaulted. Milwaukee saw between 1,100 and 1,200 properties go into tax foreclosure every year. When the city inherited these used-up and