22. United States Conference of Mayors, Hunger and Homelessness Survey (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Mayors, 2013); Martha Burt, “Homeless Families, Singles, and Others: Findings from the 1996 National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients,” Housing Policy Debate 12 (2001): 737–80; Maureen Crane and Anthony Warnes, “Evictions and Prolonged Homelessness,” Housing Studies 15 (2000): 757–73.
On the effects of substandard housing and unsafe neighborhoods on children’s health, see Julie Clark and Ade Kearns, “Housing Improvements, Perceived Housing Quality and Psychosocial Benefits from the Home,” Housing Studies 27 (2012): 915–39; Tama Leventhal and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, “The Neighborhoods They Live In: The Effects of Neighborhood Residence on Child and Adolescent Outcomes,” Psychological Bulletin 126 (2000): 309–37.
23. Joseph Harkness and Sandra Newman, “Housing Affordability and Children’s Well-Being: Evidence from the National Survey of America’s Families,” Housing Policy Debate 16 (2005): 223–55; Sandra Newman and Scott Holupka, “Housing Affordability and Investments in Children,” Journal of Housing Economics 24 (2014): 89–100.
24. In other markets, when a commodity gets too expensive, people can buy less of it. When the price of oil shoots up, people can drive less. When a sad corn crop scales up the price of beef, people can eat fewer burgers. But when the price of rent and utilities rises, most poor Americans do not have the option of consuming cheaper or smaller housing, because it doesn’t exist in their city. According to the 2013 American Housing Survey (Table C-02-RO), roughly 98 percent of renting households below the poverty line live in apartments with at least one bedroom, and 68 percent live in units with two or more bedrooms. In Milwaukee, fully 97 percent of renters live in a one-, two-, or three-bedroom unit. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. Smaller housing units have vanished from the American city. In the 1970s and 1980s more than a million single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel units were regulated out by new building standards or upwardly converted to cater to better-off renters. See Whet Moser, “The Long, Slow Decline of Chicago’s SROs,” Chicago magazine, June 14, 2013; Brendan O’Flaherty, Making Room: The Economics of Homelessness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 142–47; James Wright and Beth Rubin, “Is Homelessness a Housing Problem?,” Housing Policy Debate 2 (1991): 937–56; Christopher Jencks, The Homeless (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), chapter 6.
Besides moving away from their job, friends, family, and community, the only way low-income tenants can shrink their housing is by taking in boarders. But many landlords simply do not allow this. Even if they were to overlook maximum-occupancy regulations, more people in an apartment means more maintenance costs and a higher water bill. The majority of Milwaukee renter households (75 percent) are not responsible for the water bill. For insight into how landlords and property managers think about occupancy and cost in relation to that bill, consider what Joe Parazinski, a white building manager who lived and worked in the inner city, had to say: “If I move in [more] people, all of a sudden now there’s ten living there. Well, now that’s ten showers a day….Now the toilet, instead of being flushed twenty times a day, it’s now being flushed two hundred times. Now, how many more loads are going to be run through the washer machine?…When you start adding that shit up, it’s not petty.”
Housing advocates tend to think “doubling up” is a problem, but poor renters tend to think doubling up is a solution—because although overcrowding is not innocent of consequences, the much bigger problem they face is undercrowding, the coerced overconsumption of housing they cannot afford. The majority of poor renting households nationwide are not overcrowded: 24 percent of those households have more than 1.5 persons per bedroom. Only 8 percent of all renter households in Milwaukee have more than two people per bedroom. By this definition of overcrowding—more than two people per bedroom—4 percent of white renters, 8 percent of black renters, and 16 percent of Hispanic renters in Milwaukee live in overcrowded apartments. Almost half of all adult renters in Milwaukee do not live with another adult. African American renters in Milwaukee are particularly isolated when it comes to their living arrangements: only 35 percent live with another adult, compared to 58 percent of white renters and 69 percent of Hispanic renters. Among all Milwaukee renters, 32 percent live alone, 16 percent live only with children, and 53 percent live with another adult. Thirty-nine percent of black renters live alone, compared to 33 percent of white renters and 14 percent of Hispanic renters. Twenty-six percent of black renters live only with children, compared to 9 percent of white renters and 17 percent of Hispanic renters. Some surveyed renters likely failed to disclose other adults living with them, especially if the landlord was unaware of them. In the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study (2011), interviewers asked tenants to list all adults who lived or stayed with them. After explaining how their information would be kept confidential, interviewers told participants: “I’m interested in all adults that live or stay with you—even if they are not on the lease and even if your landlord doesn’t know about them.” Tenants in eviction court listed 375 co-resident adults, including 70 who were not leaseholders. Black men made up the largest group of adults not listed on the Summons and Complaint (N=32), followed by black women (N=24). My estimate of the percentage of black renters who live alone (or without another adult) is probably somewhat inflated, then; but the point about the prevalence of overcrowding among renters not matching the concern about overcrowding among policymakers and analysts remains. American Housing Survey (2013), Table C-02-RO; Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.
Studies have documented an association between crowding and adverse outcomes, but there is not much robust causal evidence of the effect of crowding. See Gary Evans, Susan Saegert, and Rebecca Harris, “Residential Density and Psychological Health Among Children in Low-Income Families,” Environment and Behavior 33 (2001): 165–80; Dominique Goux and Eric Maurin, “The Effect of Overcrowded Housing on Children’s Performance at School,” Journal of Public Economics 89 (2005): 797–819; Claudia Solari and Robert Mare, “Housing Crowding Effects on Children’s Well-Being,” Social Science Research 41 (2012): 464–76.
25. Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 23.
26. Louis Winnick, “The Triumph of Housing Allowance Programs: How a Fundamental Policy Conflict Was Resolved,” Cityscape 1 (1995): 95–118, 97. The quotation comes from the documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011), directed by Chad Freidrichs.
27. Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (New York: Random House, 1991); Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
28. Public housing inventory has fallen by roughly 20 percent since 1991. Peter Marcuse and W. Dennis Keating, “The Permanent Housing Crisis: The Failures of Conservatism and the Limitations of Liberalism,” in A Right to Housing: Foundation for a New Social Agenda, eds. Rachel Bratt, Michael Stone, and Chester Hartman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 139–62; Rachel Bratt, Michael Stone, and Chester Hartman, “Why a Right to Housing Is Needed and Makes Sense: Editor’s Introduction,” ibid., 1–19; Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States.