7. Gary Evans, “The Environment of Childhood Poverty,” American Psychologist 59 (2004): 77–92; Shigehiro Oishi, “The Psychology of Residential Mobility: Implications for the Self, Social Relationships, and Well-Being,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 5 (2010): 5–21; Robert Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
8. In fact, one can detect a thick middle-class bias among researchers who assume that moves are deliberate and planned. For a further explanation of the intentionality bias in residential mobility research, see Matthew Desmond and Tracey Shollenberger, “Forced Displacement from Rental Housing: Prevalence and Neighborhood Consequences,” Demography, forthcoming. On high rates of residential mobility among poor families, see David Ihrke and Carol Faber, Geographical Mobility: 2005 to 2010 (Washington, DC: United States Census Bureau, 2012); Robin Phinney, “Exploring Residential Mobility Among Low-Income Families,” Social Service Review 87 (2013): 780–815.
9. This finding comes from a negative binomial model that estimated the number of moves renters undertook in the previous two years, conditioning on household income, race, education, gender, family status, age, criminal record, and three recent life shocks: job loss, relationship dissolution, and eviction. The analysis found that low incomes predicted higher rates of mobility only before controlling for involuntary displacement and that, all else equal, renters who experienced a forced move were expected to have a moving rate 1.3 times greater than those who avoided involuntary displacement. See Matthew Desmond, Carl Gershenson, and Barbara Kiviat, “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters,” Social Service Review 89 (2015): 227–62. By “Milwaukee’s poorest renters,” I mean renting households in the lowest income quartile (with incomes below $12,204). Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.
10. On Jackson County, Missouri, see Tara Raghuveer, “?‘We Be Trying’: A Multistate Analysis of Eviction and the Affordable Housing Crisis,” B.A. thesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Committee on the Degrees in Social Studies, 2014). In 2012, New York City’s Housing Courts processed 28,743 eviction judgments and 217,914 eviction filings for nonpayment. See New York City Rent Guidelines Board, 2013 Income and Affordability Study, April 4, 2013. Cleveland, a city of approximately 95,702 occupied renter households, saw 11,072 eviction filings in 2012 and 11,031 in 2013—meaning that almost 12 percent of renter households were summoned to eviction court each year. See Northeast Ohio Apartment Association, Suites magazine, “Eviction Index,” 2012–2013; American Community Survey, 2013. In 2012, an estimated 32,231 evictions were filed in Chicago, which represents 7 percent of the city’s rental inventory; see Kay Cleaves, “Cook Eviction Stats Part 5: Are Eviction Filings Increasing?,” StrawStickStone.com, February 8, 2013.
11. Matthew Desmond and Carl Gershenson, “Housing and Employment Insecurity Among the Working Poor,” Social Problems, forthcoming.
12. Evictions also help to exacerbate the problem most responsible for their rise by driving up rents. This is plain in cases where landlords evict tenants from rent-regulated units so that they may offer apartments at market rates. But it is also true of normal evictions of families from unregulated units because it is easier to raise the rent on new tenants than old ones. In Milwaukee, a tenant annually pays almost $58 less in rent for every year she has lived in an apartment, all else equal. Turnover facilitates rent hikes, and evictions create turnover. Matthew Desmond and Kristin Perkins, “Are Landlords Overcharging Voucher Holders?,” working paper, Harvard University, June 2015. In San Francisco, Ellis Act evictions—often used to convert rent-regulated apartments into condos or market-rate units—increased by 170 percent between March 2010 and February 2013. Marisa Lagos, “San Francisco Evictions Surge, Report Finds,” San Francisco Gate, November 5, 2013.
13. Matthew Desmond and Rachel Tolbert Kimbro, “Eviction’s Fallout: Housing, Hardship, and Health,” Social Forces (2015), in press.
14. Desmond et al., “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters.”
15. Technically, the results of lagged dependent variable regression models showed that experiencing a forced move is associated with a standard deviation increase of more than one-third in both neighborhood poverty and crime rates, relative to voluntary moves. Across all models, the most robust and consistent predictors of neighborhood downgrades between moves are race (whether a renter is African American) and move type (whether the move was forced). Desmond and Shollenberger, “Forced Displacement from Rental Housing.”
16. Sampson, Great American City; Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
17. This finding is documented in a study called “Eviction’s Fallout,” coauthored with Rachel Kimbro. In that study, we rely on a dichotomous indicator to measure depressive symptoms in mothers. Mothers were asked a series of questions, focused on experiences in the previous twelve months, based on the Composite International Diagnostic Interview Short Form (CIDI-SF). Respondents were asked whether they had feelings of dysphoria (depression) or anhedonia (inability to enjoy what is usually pleasurable) in the past year that lasted for two weeks or more, and if so, whether the symptoms lasted most of the day and occurred every day of the two-week period. If so, they were asked more specific questions about: (a) losing interest, (b) feeling tired, (c) change in weight, (d) trouble sleeping, (e) trouble concentrating, (f) feeling worthless, and (g) thinking about death. Mothers were classified as probable cases of depression if they endorsed either dysphoria or anhedonia plus two of the other symptoms in the follow-up questions (leading to a CIDI-SF MD score of 3 or higher). Results are robust to varying the cut-point for the depression scale as well as to negative binomial models estimating the number of depressive symptoms respondents reported. See Ronald Kessler et al., “Methodological Studies of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) in the US National Comorbidity Survey (NCS),” International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research 7 (1998): 33–55.
18. Michael Serby et al., “Eviction as a Risk Factor for Suicide,” Psychiatric Services 57 (2006): 273–74. Katherine Fowler et al., “Increase in Suicides Associated with Home Eviction and Foreclosure During the US Housing Crisis: Findings from 16 National Violent Death Reporting System States, 2005–2010,” American Journal of Public Health 105 (2015): 311–16.
19. Sampson, Great American City.
20. This result draws on neighborhood-level data for Milwaukee, 2005–2007. Using a lagged-response model, I predicted a neighborhood’s violent-crime rate for one year, controlling for violent crime and eviction rates the previous year as well as for the percentage of families in poverty, of African Americans in the neighborhood, of the population under eighteen years of age, of residents with less than a high school education, and of households receiving housing assistance. The final model documented a significant association between a neighborhood’s violent crime rate and its eviction rate the previous year (B = .155; p < .05). See Matthew Desmond, “Do More Evictions Lead to Higher Crime? Neighborhood Consequences of Forced Displacement,” working paper, Harvard University, August 2015.
21. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.