Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,36

pieces of identification. “You need to require sufficient and verifiable income. If they say they are self-employed, well, drug dealers are self-employed.” Karen brought up CCAP. The landlords also received an advertisement for ScreeningWorks, which promised to provide “the most comprehensive background information about your rental applicants.” For $29.95, landlords could obtain a report listing an applicant’s eviction and criminal record, credit evaluation, previous addresses, and other information. “ScreeningWorks is a service of RentGrow,” the advertisement read. “RentGrow has 10+ years experience in multifamily resident screening, and serves over half a million rental units a year.”6

“Look,” Karen said, “if they have a recent court-ordered eviction or delinquency, you’re not going to rent to them. If they have an eviction, what makes you think they’re going to pay you?”7 Herself a landlord, Karen paid attention to how someone looked at her unit. This point was repeated in the thick training manual landlords received at registration: “Do they check out each room?…Do they mentally visualize where the furniture will go, which room the children will sleep in, or how they’ll make best use of the kitchen layout? Or do they barely walk in the front door before asking to rent, showing a surprising lack of interest in the details? People who make an honest living care about their home and often show it in the way they look at the unit. Some who rent for illegal operations forget to pretend they have the same interest.”8

The small act of screening could have big consequences. From thousands of yes/no decisions emerged a geography of advantage and disadvantage that characterized the modern American city: good schools and failing ones, safe streets and dangerous ones.9 Landlords were major players in distributing the spoils. They decided who got to live where. And their screening practices (or lack thereof) revealed why crime and gang activity or an area’s civic engagement and its spirit of neighborliness could vary drastically from one block to the next. They also helped explain why on the same block in the same low-income neighborhood, one apartment complex but not another became familiar to the police.10

Screening practices that banned criminality and poverty in the same stroke drew poor families shoulder to shoulder with drug dealers, sex offenders, and other lawbreakers in places with lenient requirements. Neighborhoods marred by high poverty and crime were that way not only because poverty could incite crime, and crime could invite poverty, but also because the techniques landlords used to “keep illegal and destructive activity out of rental property” kept poverty out as well. This also meant that violence, drug activity, deep poverty, and other social problems coalesced at a much smaller, more acute level than the neighborhood. They gathered at the same address.

For people familiar with hunger and scarcity, addiction and prison, that often meant being isolated from job networks and exposed to vice and violence. But it also meant people could air problems; swap food, clothes, and information; and finish one another’s sentences about lousy jobs or social workers or prison (“They put gravy—”…“On everything!”). It meant that, should they be in the early stages of opiate withdrawal, they could take a walk around their trailer park to calm the shakes and run into a fellow junkie who could give them what they needed.

Some landlords neglected to screen tenants for the same reason payday lenders offered unsecured, high-interest loans to families with unpaid debt or lousy credit; for the same reason that the subprime industry gave mortgages to people who could not afford them; for the same reason Rent-A-Center allowed you to take home a new Hisense air conditioner or Klaussner “Lazarus” reclining sofa without running a credit check. There was a business model at the bottom of every market.11

“Questions?” Karen’s eyes panned the room.

“Should I do a short-term or long-term lease?”

“First, do a lease. Please. Put it in writing. Between sixty and seventy percent of rental agreements in this state are verbal.”

A man in a camouflage hat raised his hand with a question about evictions: “Do you have to leave them there for three months or some foolish thing?”

“No. Nothing protects you from not paying the rent.”

“Is there a maximum charge for a late fee?”

The room laughed nervously, and Karen frowned at the question.

“Can you go in any of the common areas, the hallways, the open basement, without any notice?”

Karen paused for effect. She smiled at the woman who had asked the question. She was a black woman, probably in her fifties, who had sat in the