Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

After her daughter sets off a fire alarm at the Lodge, Vanetta and her children are forced to leave. She moves in with her sister and continues to look for a place to live. For her part, Crystal has been homeless, sleeping in the foyer of a church or at the Amtrak station or just riding buses when she has nowhere to go. She meets an older woman, Patricia, at a bus stop, and they are roommates by the end of the day. Soon, however, Patricia’s daughter takes Crystal’s cell phone and either loses or sells it at school. Patricia and Crystal get in a fistfight, which ends with Patricia on the ground in a fetal position while Crystal repeatedly uses her foot to stomp her in the face. 

Crystal and Vanetta finally find a landlord desperate enough to rent them an apartment. After moving in, Crystal gets in a fight about her cell phone with a woman she met at the Lodge and pushes the woman through a window. To keep from being evicted, Vanetta kicks Crystal out and pays to fix the window. Crystal goes back to being homeless and splits her time between attending a new church she’s joined and working as a prostitute.  

The day of Vanetta’s sentencing arrives. Her youngest son, Kendal, goes to court with her. Both the prosecutor and her public defender admit she’s not the typical case, which comes through to the court as it’s her first offense, and she was driven by desperation. The judge recognizes this fact but also says this is not a probationary case. He sentences her to eighty-one months in the state prison system: fifteen months of initial confinement followed by sixty-six months of extended supervision: “Hands behind her back, Vanetta turned around, tears streaming down her cheeks. Kendal stared back, stone-faced, just like his momma had taught him” (267).

After his three-day bender, Scott goes to his friend, Pito, for help to get clean. While drying out, he becomes friends with Pito’s brother, Dave, a recovering addict, and his wife, Anna. A few weeks later, Scott is evicted from his apartment and moves to Dave and Anna’s couch. He attends Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings every day and cleans up The Serenity House, an AA “bar,” every night. He wants his nursing license reinstated and begins paying for regular urinalysis tests to prove he’s not on drugs. Scott finds out months later, however, none of these results count because the tests weren’t done at the nursing board’s lab. Plus, all the issues he was using drugs to avoid come back once he’s clean. He says, “I can feel my body getting better […] but when you have years and years and years of not feeling anything from drinking and dope, then it kind of hits you” (271). He begins using heroin again and is kicked out of Dave and Anna’s house.    

Scott begins a methadone treatment program and moves into the Guest House, a homeless shelter. Most people drop out of methadone programs, but he sticks with it. As time goes by, he becomes a resident manager at the shelter and works at a satellite shelter, too. After a year and $4,700 spent on methadone treatments, the county begins paying for most of the cost, reducing Scott’s contribution to $35 a month.

Scott takes advantage of the Guest House’s permanent housing program and moves into a rent-subsidized apartment downtown, next to a mall. He only has to pay $141 of the $775 monthly rent. A month goes by before Scott’s convinced he really will get to keep the apartment. He works out a five-year plan to return to nursing and keeps a change jar in his kitchen to save for the necessary urinalysis tests. His old life in the trailer park recedes to the past, and when he does think about it, he goes to the mall” “Walking the mall’s floors, Scott would take in the lights, music, food smells, and people and remember how he used to feel, years ago, when the city was still full of wonder and promise” (281). 

Eighty-nine potential landlords later, the ninetieth one rents Arleen an apartment and tells her she has no room for error. It’s a nice place, and Arleen begins settling in with her sons. Problems soon crop up. Trisha sometimes babysits the boys, and neighbors complain about her smoking pot. Plus, at least once she knocks on neighbors’ doors, looking for pot. In addition, Jafaris has an asthma attack which results in the fire department and an ambulance showing up. Arleen is summarily evicted.    

Arleen and her sons move in with Trisha in the upstairs apartment on Thirteenth Street. The boys want to play with Little, but he’s been run over by a car. Jori finds a foam mannequin head in the apartment and begins punching it over and over, faster and faster, grunting from the effort. Arleen and Trisha have to scream at him to stop.

Trisha is now a prostitute and men show up at all hours to have sex with her in the apartment’s one bedroom. Then, her pimp Sunny and his family move in. One day, all these people disappear without a word. A few days later, movers show up. It turns out Chris, Trisha’s violent ex-boyfriend, has gotten out of jail, and Belinda, Trisha’s payee, has moved her to a new, safer location. Arleen and the boys are homeless again: “Poverty could pile on; living it often meant steering through gnarled thickets of interconnected misfortunes and trying not to go crazy. There were moments of calm, but life on balance was facing one crisis after another” (285).

Arleen moves in with her sister, loses her welfare benefits due to missing appointments, moves into another apartment, and must soon move out, after being robbed at gunpoint in it: “Arleen began to unravel. ‘Just my soul is messed up,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I find my body trembling or shaking. I’m tired, but I can’t sleep […] My body is trying to shut down’” (291).

After more ups and downs, she and the boys finally seem to achieve some stability at an apartment near the Tabernacle Community Baptist Church. Jori tells Arleen he wants to be a carpenter when he grows up so he can build her a house. Arleen tells him she wishes her life were different, and that when she’s old she wants to see that her children have done well: “And we’ll all be together, and be laughing. We be remembering stuff like this and be laughing at it” (292).

Desmond writes, “The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets […] Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home, we remove our masks” (293). Home is also the beginning of civic life, as it is the connections with neighbors and working for the common good that creates community. Scott pulls himself out of addiction thanks in large part to his affordable apartment obtained through the Guest House. After moving to Tennessee, the home life the Hinkstons create there, through their extended family support system, allows them to escape the malaise that had overtaken their lives in Milwaukee. If Arleen and Vanetta didn’t have to spend 70-80% of their income on rent, maybe they could build better lives, too.

Residential stability promotes psychological stability, which results in community stability. A lack of residential stability has the opposite effect, leading to individuals having depression and related issues as well as forcing the poor into communities that are increasingly unsafe and crime-ridden. Eviction affects everyone, young and old, but statistics in Milwaukee indicate it affects black women more often: 1 in 5 black women are evicted in their lives, while the percentage is 1 in 12 for Hispanic women and 1 in 15 for white women. Most of these households have children who bear the effects of this experience, and households spending 50% or more of their income on rent have correspondingly less money for the children in them.  

Desmond makes several proposals to deal with the rental housing issue. First, public defenders should be made available to the poor to deal with court cases involving evictions, which would in turn lower the eviction rate. (Public defenders are legally mandated only for criminal cases, not civil ones.) He admits this would cost more money, but a study conducted in New York City indicates the cost is more than covered by the savings from families not being forced into shelters after evictions or using other emergency social services. Second, the federally-funded Housing Voucher Choice Program must be expanded to include all poor people. Currently, the program serves 1.2 million families, but this is only 33% of poor renting families. Finally, the rates at which rent increases must be controlled so landlords don’t continue to raise rent as tenants have access to more assistance. He points out many countries use variations of these ideas—England and the Netherlands among them—so it could be done in the U.S., too.

In the end, Desmond believes aggressive exploitation of the poor must be stopped as the civic right to have a stable home trumps the capitalist need to extract as much money as possible from the poor. He concludes by saying, “This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering—by no American value is this situation justified” (313). 

In this final section, Desmond explains how he became interested in the topic of eviction and why he wrote the book the way he did.

Desmond is from Winslow, Arizona, and grew up in a family where money was always tight. After high school, he went to Arizona State University with the plan to become a lawyer. Once he began his studies—and after his parents’ house was repossessed—he became interested in how the vision of America he’d grown up with, thanks to his parents, Sunday-school teachers, and being a Boy Scout, didn’t square with the financial inequality around him. After graduating, he entered a PhD program in sociology at the University of Wisconsin. 

Through his graduate research, Desmond discovered there were two main reasons used to explain poverty: 1) structural forces outside anyone’s control, such as the historical effects of slavery; or 2) individual deficiencies. When he calculated the high cost of being poor, however, he thought perhaps there was another way to look at this and decided to write a book that wasn’t just about poor people and poor places. Desmond writes, “Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship” (317).

Desmond moved into the College Mobile Home Park in May 2008 and subsequently began hanging out in the office with Tobin, Lenny, and Office Susie as a way of integrating himself into the community. When fall arrived, he moved to the North Side, sharing an apartment with a black security guard who worked for the management company that took over operations at the trailer park. Sherrena was his landlord, and she took him under her wing, so he could learn the rental business. He stayed there until June 2009.

Once his fieldwork was complete, Desmond transcribed the recordings he’d made and organized his notes. When he was done, he had over 5,000 single-spaced pages. He discovered there were no empirical studies that looked at eviction in a meaningful way. Desmond, working with the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, created and administered the Milwaukee Area Renters Study (MARS) which interviewed 1,100 tenants between 2009 and 2011. A follow-up six-week study, the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, interviewed 250 tenants immediately after court hearings. He discovered, for example, having children tripled the odds of a tenant receiving an eviction judgement.

Finally, Desmond explains he didn’t use the first-person in the book because he wanted the book to be about the people in it, not about his reactions to them, which is common in many first-person ethnographies. This is not to say the events he saw didn’t affect him—he admits the hardest thing about fieldwork is leaving the people you’ve met—but that’s less important than the people enduring these events. Desmond explains, “At a time of rampant inequality and widespread hardship, when hunger and homelessness are found throughout America, I am interested in a different, more urgent conversation. ‘I’ don’t matter” (335).