6. I did not rely on any qualitative data software.
7. The fact-checker was Gillian Brassil. I provided Gillian with all of my field notes after she signed a nondisclosure agreement. Gillian corroborated accounts by conducting background research (e.g., police data, legal statutes), almost thirty independent interviews, and reviewing public records as well as my field notes, photographs, and transcripts of my digital recordings. Besides asking for documentation for several details recorded in this book, Gillian also randomly selected 10 percent of the book manuscript’s pages and asked me to show her where she could find corresponding scenes or observations in the field notes. Often, she requested photographs or official documents to support claims.
8. I provided a copy of the manuscript (either the entire work or relevant chapters) to everyone featured prominently in its pages. In some cases, I read relevant portions to people to check factual details.
9. Policy wonks and poverty researchers never tire of debating the details of this or that housing policy. Of policies that serve a sliver of the urban poor, they ask a hundred questions. According to Google Scholar, there are more than 4,800 scholarly articles and books in which the phrase “Moving to Opportunity” appears in the text. This neighborhood relocation initiative designed to move families out of disadvantaged neighborhoods was a bold and important program—which served roughly 4,600 households. In other words, by now every family who benefited from Moving to Opportunity could have their own study in which their program was mentioned. We know much more about public housing, which serves less than 2 percent of the population, than about inner-city landlords and their properties, which constitute the bulk of housing for the ghetto poor. We know much more about housing vouchers, enjoyed by the lucky minority of low-income families, than about how the majority of low-income families make ends meet unassisted in the private rental market. In 1995, Richard Arnott observed that economists’ “focus on rent control has diverted attention from more important housing policy issues….Not a single paper has been published in a leading journal during the last decade dealing with low-income housing problems.” Richard Arnott, “Time for Revisionism on Rent Control?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (1995): 99–120, 117.
10. Matthew Desmond and Tracey Shollenberger, “Forced Displacement from Rental Housing: Prevalence and Neighborhood Consequences,” Demography, forthcoming.
11. Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 88–133.
12. Doubly robust logistic regression models, as well as several matching analyses, were used to estimate the odds of receiving an eviction judgment. Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011. For models, see Matthew Desmond et al., “Evicting Children,” Social Forces (2013) 92: 303–27.
13. Go to https://thedata.harvard.edu.
14. Just over half of Milwaukee’s housing units are occupied by renters, a proportion similar to those in other cities (e.g., Chicago, Houston, Baltimore). In terms of median rent, Milwaukee County ranks 1,420th out of 4,763 counties in the United States and Puerto Rico. Cities with similar rent distributions include Portland, OR; Charlotte, NC; Gary, IN; and Baton Rouge, LA. Cities with a stalwart tradition of tenant unionizing and an economically diverse rental population—e.g., Boston, Los Angeles—tend to boast of toothier tenant protections than those, like Milwaukee, in which most middle-and upper-class households own their home. But most cities’ renter protections more closely resemble Milwaukee’s than Boston’s or Los Angeles’s. See National Multifamily Housing Council, Quick Facts: Resident Demographics (Washington, DC: National Multifamily Housing Council, 2009); US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 50th Percentile Rent Estimates for 2010 (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2010).
15. To paraphrase Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 15.
16. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 5.
17. The rise of first-person ethnographic narration is the product of the postmodern turn in anthropology, which focused attention on the politics and biases of the author. Before that, much of ethnography was written in the third person. The authors of The Taxi-Dance Hall (1932) or Street Corner Society (1943) or even Tally’s Corner (1967) are hardly on the page.
JUST SHELTER
To learn more about how you can help families avoid eviction or get back on their feet after being displaced, visit www.justshelter.org.
About the Author
MATTHEW DESMOND is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and codirector of the Justice and Poverty Project. A former member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, he is the author of the award-winning book On the Fireline, coauthor of two books on race, and editor of a collection of studies on severe deprivation in America. His work has been supported by the Ford, Russell Sage, and National Science Foundations, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. In 2015, Desmond was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” grant.