Writing this book, I have prioritized firsthand observation. When something important happened that I didn’t see, I spoke to multiple people about the event whenever possible and checked details by drawing on other sources, such as news reports, medical or court records, and mortgage files. I have indicated in the notes all events sourced from secondhand accounts. I said that someone “thought” or “believed” something only when they said as much to me. When writing about things that happened in people’s past, I said someone “remembered” or “recalled” it a certain way. To interrogate those details, I would ask the same person the same questions multiple times over several years. This proved to be incredibly useful, as some things people told me at the beginning turned out to be inaccurate. Sometimes, the truth comes out slow.
As much as possible, I vetted the material in this book by reaching out to third parties. Often, this meant confirming the possibility of something happening, if not the thing itself. For example, I was able to verify with the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families that the welfare sanctions Arleen experienced were not uncommon. I had overheard Arleen explain the sanctions to Sherrena and had accompanied Arleen as she met with a caseworker to sort out the details; but because this was something I could corroborate with a few emails and phone calls, I did. After all, eyewitnessing is a fraught and imperfect thing, as any defense attorney will tell you. Things hide in plain sight and misdirection is everywhere. I dropped stories that could not be verified through this method. Once, Natasha Hinkston told me that she stopped going to high school after there was a shooting in her cafeteria. After confirming this story with Doreen, I found myself drawn to it, eager to include it somewhere, which is an impulse I’ve learned to mistrust. So I spoke with three separate Milwaukee Public School administrators, none of whom could confirm that a shooting occurred around the time Natasha said it did. Perhaps something did happen and the administrators were wrong; perhaps the gist (if not the details) of Natasha’s story was true; perhaps not. Whatever the case, I excluded this account and two others that could not be corroborated in this manner. Once the book was fully drafted, I hired an independent fact-checker.7 I also traveled to Milwaukee and Brownsville, Tennessee, to tie up loose ends.8
I am frequently asked how I “handled” this research, by which people mean: How did seeing this level of poverty and suffering affect you, personally? I don’t think people realize how raw and intimate a question this is. So I’ve developed several dishonest responses, which I drop like those smoke bombs magicians use when they want to glide offstage, unseen. The honest answer is that the work was heartbreaking and left me depressed for years. You do learn how to cope from those who are coping. After several people told me, “Stop looking at me like that,” I learned to suppress my shock at traumatic things. I learned to tell a real crisis from mere poverty. I learned that behavior that looks lazy or withdrawn to someone perched far above the poverty line can actually be a pacing technique. People like Crystal or Larraine cannot afford to give all their energy to today’s emergency only to have none left over for tomorrow’s. I saw in the trailer park and inner city resilience and spunk and brilliance. I heard a lot of laughter. But I also saw a lot of pain. Toward the end of my fieldwork, I wrote in my journal, “I feel dirty, collecting these stories and hardships like so many trophies.” The guilt I felt during my fieldwork only intensified after I left. I felt like a phony and like a traitor, ready to confess to some unnamed accusation. I couldn’t help but translate a bottle of wine placed in front of me at a university function or my monthly day-care bill into rent payments or bail money back in Milwaukee. It leaves an impression, this kind of work. Now imagine it’s your life.
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As I spent more time with tenants and landlords, I found myself needing answers to basic questions that were beyond the reach of my fieldwork. How prominent is eviction? What are its consequences? Who gets evicted? If poor families are spending so much on housing, what are they going without? So I went looking for studies that answered these questions. Urban poverty, community, slums—these topics had been foundational to American sociology from the beginning. Surely someone had looked into it.
But I found no study—and no readily available data—that adequately addressed my questions. This was strange, especially given what I was seeing every day in Milwaukee. I wondered how we in the research community could have overlooked something so fundamental to poverty in America: the dynamics of the private housing market. The answer, I would later come to realize, was in the way we had been studying housing. By and large, poverty researchers had focused narrowly on public housing or other housing policies; either that, or they had overlooked housing because they were more interested in the character of urban neighborhoods—their levels of residential segregation or resistance to gentrification, for example.9 And yet here was the private rental market, where the vast majority of poor people lived, playing such an imposing and vital role in the lives of the families I knew in Milwaukee, consuming most of their income; aggravating their poverty and deprivation; resulting in their eviction, insecurity, and homelessness; dictating where they lived and whom they lived with; and powerfully influencing the character and stability of their neighborhoods. And we hardly knew a thing about it.
I tried to ignore this problem, wanting to spend all my time with landlords and tenants on the ground. But when my questions didn’t go away, I set out to gather the data myself. I began by designing a survey of tenants in Milwaukee’s private housing sector. The survey began small, but with the support of the MacArthur Foundation it grew into something more. I called it the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, MARS for short. From 2009 to 2011, roughly 1,100 tenants were interviewed in their homes by professional interviewers trained and supervised by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, which reported to me. To facilitate estimates generalizable to Milwaukee’s entire rental population, households from across the city were interviewed. Clipboards and portable Lenovo ThinkPad computers in hand, interviewers ventured into some of the city’s worst neighborhoods. One was bitten by a dog and, later, mugged.
Thanks to the heroic efforts of the Survey Center, MARS had an extraordinarily high response rate for a survey of such a highly mobile and poor population (84 percent). What I was learning during my fieldwork deeply informed MARS’s 250 questions: not only what I asked but how I asked it. For example, when I was living in the trailer park, I learned that asking why someone moved was no simple task. Tenants often provided an explanation for a move that maximized their own volition. And asking about involuntary mobility, for its part, came with its own set of complications, as tenants tended to have strict conceptions of eviction. Take Rose and Tim, my neighbors in the trailer park. Rose and Tim were forced to leave their trailer after Tim sustained a back injury at work. They did not go to court but undeniably were evicted. (Their names appear in the eviction records.) Nevertheless, they didn’t see things this way. “When you say ‘eviction,’?” Rose explained, “I think of the sheriffs coming and throwing you out and changing your locks, and Eagle Movers tosses your stuff on the curb. That’s an eviction. We were not evicted.” If Rose and Tim had been asked during a survey, “Have you ever been evicted?,” they would have answered no. Accordingly, surveys that have posed this question vastly underestimate the prevalence of involuntary removal from housing. I learned to ask the question differently, in light of tenants’ understanding of the matter, and designed the survey accordingly.