Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,175
some headache. Because…if you fail to vacate after the lease no longer exists and if [the landlord] has to pay for the sheriff to come and actually move your things out to the street, then that’ll cost her money and she’ll just add that on to the balance that you owe. So, it’s a really tough, unfriendly, sorry, uncomfortable, terribly disruptive situation, when you’re put out like that.”
“Just a question,” Chester said. “What if we had an agreement that we weren’t suppose to pay rent until she fixed stuff up?”
“Then, well, have a trial and we’ll find out the truth and make that determination,” the judge responded.
Myesha and Chester asked for a few minutes to talk things through. “We still gonna lose,” Myesha whispered. “It’s just how much we gonna lose.”
They took the deal.
Some people who have never been evicted or arrested like to say that accessible court records are necessary to promote “a free and open society.” Limiting access to court records, they argue, would pave the way for undemocratic state practices: secret police, undocumented arrests, hidden prisons, and God knows what else. Next to the concrete realities of how records are actually used to make families’ lives much harder, these abstract worries seem grossly out of touch. For millions of poor Americans, including those who have never committed a crime, court records severely constrict their opportunities. Let’s deal with the real problems we have, not the imaginary problems we don’t.
39. Martha Davis, “Participation, Equality, and the Civil Right to Counsel: Lessons from Domestic and International Law,” Yale Law Journal 122 (2013): 2260–81; Raven Lidman, “Civil Gideon as a Human Right: Is the U.S. Going to Join Step with the Rest of the Developed World?,” Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review 15 (2006): 769–800.
40. Quoted in Cass Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 3.
41. Quoted in Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 215.
42. “Exploitation” appears but twice in William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]), when Wilson summarizes orthodox Marxist accounts, and again twice in Wilson’s When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996), when he describes blacks’ aversion to it. In Loïc Wacquant’s Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), you can find four instances of “exploitation,” only one of which refers to the exploitation of the poor by the rich (page 123n7). The word makes a single appearance in Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), on page 176, in reference to sexual liaisons between inner-city residents; a single appearance in Sudhir Venkatesh’s American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), on page 150, in reference to housing project tenants being exploited by gangs; and a single appearance in Harrington’s The Other America (page 32). “Exploitation” does not appear at all in the pages of many other modern classics that take up the plight of the poor, from Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein’s Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997) to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Random House, 2012).
43. On food prices in poor neighborhoods, see Chanjin Chung and Samuel Myers, “Do the Poor Pay More for Food? An Analysis of Grocery Store Availability and Food Price Disparities,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 33 (1999): 276–96; Marianne Bitler and Steven Haider, “An Economic View of Food Deserts in the United States,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 30 (2011): 153–76.
44. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2008), 40; Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 237–38; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 30; Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 88–133. Of all people, Daniel Patrick Moynihan recognized the central importance of exploitation to understanding racialized urban poverty.