Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,156

average, welfare, food stamps, and SSI payments covered only about three-fifths of single mothers’ expenses. Even after attempting to make up the difference by working side jobs and seeking help from agencies, many endured severe hardship, going hungry or forgoing winter clothing and medical care. Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997).

9. See, for example, Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), 73; Sandra Susan Smith, Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism Among the Black Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007). For an extended treatment, see Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor.” Other ethnographers have documented similar network dynamics in poor neighborhoods: see Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 163–65, 182; Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls, 73. Of course, these dynamics can be observed at all levels of society. The tendency to rely on perfect strangers for emotional comfort, for example, is fairly common among the middle class, as evidenced by the so-called “stranger on a plane” phenomenon. Although poor people’s strategy of relying on disposable ties is not different in kind from the tendency of rich people to rely on strangers, it often is different in degree. It is only the poor who routinely rely on disposable ties to meet basic human needs.

10. People see neighborhoods as much more than school districts and the usual ecological indicators. They see things much too personal to quantify but powerful enough to attract them to or repel them from entire sections of the city.

11. Crystal had allowed her food stamps to lapse after her grandmother died the year before. She remembered her grandmother’s death causing her to fall into a dark depression. “I didn’t do shit. Sleep all day. Get in the shower. Eat. Go back in the house and go back to sleep. I shut down—on everything and everybody.” It was another example of how a trauma exacerbated poverty.

12. That is, Crystal used an insult in place of Jori’s name.

13. E-24

1. On the North Side, white landlords often hired black property managers. Said Sherrena, “There’s a lot of white boys [who] come down from Brookfield here, and they buy all this inner-city shit….And they will hire a black property manager to handle things for them….The white boy will hire a black guy, maybe that looks a little mean and can keep up stuff, and they’ll bawl ’em. It’s easy.” Sherrena meant the property manager would not hesitate to yell at tenants (“bawl them out”) if they didn’t pay up. See Jennifer Lee, “Cultural Brokers: Race-Based Hiring in Inner-City Neighborhoods,” American Behavioral Scientist 41 (1998): 927–37.

2. Mortgage and release records were retrieved from the Milwaukee County Register of Deeds.

3. Tobin and Lenny’s rent records showed that during most months five trailers sat empty and forty tenants were behind, the average amount owed in a month being $340. Five vacancies a month left 126 trailers paying an average of $550 in monthly rent. Subtract from that total missed rent payments in the amount of $163,200 (40 × $340 × 12). This reduction was probably too drastic for two reasons. First, Tobin did not carry out anything close to forty evictions a month; so most people found a way to satisfy their debts. Second, missing payment estimates were based on summer-month totals (the trailer park’s rent rolls from April to July 2008) when nonpayments and evictions spiked. Nevertheless, I have kept these likely inflated reductions to generate a conservative estimate. Tobin’s overhead consisted of Lenny and Susie, whose combined annual salaries and rent reductions ran just shy of $50,000. Lenny’s annual salary and rent waiver totaled $42,600 ($36,000 + $6,600), and Susie’s salary and rent reduction totaled $6,400. (Tobin considered Susie a part-time employee, whom he paid $5 an hour for twenty hours a week; or: [$5/hr × 20 hours × 52] + $1,200 in reduced rent.) With respect to maintenance, all but twenty trailers were “owned,” which meant tenants footed most repair bills. Estimated regular maintenance costs rarely exceeded $5,000 a month, even after accounting for money paid for grass cutting and litter pickup. But I have kept this likely inflated estimate as well. Tobin’s property taxes were $49,457 in 2008, and his water bill was $26,708 that year. (Both figures were pulled from public records.) Tenants paid gas and electricity. Eviction court costs? Tobin averaged three formal evictions