income for full-time workers in Milwaukee was $33,010 for black men and $29,454 for black women—a difference equivalent to five months of rent for the average Milwaukee apartment. Many women in the inner city also had more expenses. This was particularly true for single-mother households, which made up the majority of black households in Milwaukee. Single mothers often could not rely on regular support from their children’s fathers, and because of their children, they had to seek out larger and more expensive housing options than noncustodial fathers, who could sleep on someone’s couch or rent a room. Sherrena rented her inner-city rooming house rooms for $400 a month (utilities included), a good deal less than the two-bedroom units Arleen and other single mothers rented for $550 (utilities excluded). With Milwaukee’s maximum occupancy limits in mind—widely interpreted as two heartbeats per bedroom—many landlords refused to rent single mothers smaller units. More heartbeats meant more bedrooms—and more rent. See City of Milwaukee Code of Ordinances, Chapter 200: Building and Zoning Code, Subchapter 8: “Occupancy and Use.” See Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty.”
11. Manny Fernandez, “Still Home for the Holidays, When Evictions Halt,” New York Times, December 21, 2008.
12. The “second cause” deals with unpaid rent; the “third cause” deals with property damage. In court, both causes are processed at the same time, leading to the legal lingo “second and third causes.”
13. Between 2006 and 2010, Milwaukee Small Claims Court each year processed roughly 12,000 eviction cases but only 200 garnishments. I have excluded from this estimate garnishments in 2009, which for some reason were exceptionally high at 537. On eviction and garnishment filings, see State of Wisconsin, 2010 Annual Report: Milwaukee County Circuit Court, First Judicial District, 2. On garnishment and execution statutes, see Wisconsin Statues §814 and §815.
14. In Milwaukee’s Landlord Training course, landlords were strongly encouraged to docket judgments. “The most important thing I’m going to ask you to do is to spend an extra five dollars and docket that judgment with the clerk of courts,” instructor Karen Long advised. “You want to add it to the credit report so that everyone out there knows that they owe you money….I’m asking you to do it for all of us who need to run credit reports on people….And also a couple years from now you might get a call, saying, ‘I’m George Jones. Remember me?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Well, I was your tenant three years ago. You have a judgment against me for seven hundred and fifty bucks. I need to buy this car. Can I give you five hundred bucks and you call it even?’ ” Karen went on to advise landlords to tell tenants about docketing: “I’m going to put this on your credit report, and nobody is going to lend you any money or lend you anything until you pay me. So it behooves you, you know, to not let any of this go on your record.”
15. Rent Recovery Service will report tenants to major credit bureaus even if landlords do not have money judgments (rentrecoveryservice).
16. In Milwaukee and many cities across the United States, the law offers few protections for tenants in arrears. “It’s the ‘what’ not the ‘why’ that matters,” the landlord saying goes. In other words, the court typically does not care why tenants fell behind, only that they did. Arleen could have articulated her housing problems clearly; she could have brought pictures. Doing so probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Once, upon learning that an elderly woman being evicted had lived without electricity for a month because her landlord was slow to repair the wiring, a court commissioner replied, “That isn’t necessarily a fact we need to work out today.” Another time, a housing court judge listened patiently as a tenant described sewage in her bathtub and rotting floorboards. Then he responded, “You’ve told me everything except that you are current on your rent.”
17. Tenants may have the right argument but the wrong presentation: too rough or meandering, too angry or meek. It would be naïve to think these considerations are uninformed by class, gender, and racial dynamics between tenants, landlords, and court actors. In the Landlord Training course, property owners are told, “The person who gets the loudest, and the noisiest, and the feistiest loses. So bite your tongue and go through it.” And even if landlords are new to eviction, many are educated members of the middle class, just like the court clerks, commissioners, and judges, who on account of their similar