3. These estimates draw on the American Housing Survey (AHS), 1991–2013. They are conservative, since they exclude renter households reporting no cash income as well as those reporting zero or negative income. The AHS records renting households that reported housing costs in excess of 100 percent of family income. For some households, this scenario reflects response error. For others, including those living off savings and those whose rent and utility bill actually is larger than their income, it does not. Analyses that have examined renter households reporting a housing cost burden in excess of 100 percent of their family income have found that only a minority of these households report receiving some assistance with rent (11 percent) or utilities (5 percent)—assistance which may be ongoing or take place on a single occasion. If you include households reporting a housing cost burden in excess of 100 percent of family income, you find that in 2013, 70 percent of poor renting families were dedicating half of their income to housing costs, and 53 percent were dedicating 70 percent or more of their income. If you exclude these households, you find that 51 percent of poor renting families were dedicating at least half of their income to housing costs, and almost one-quarter were dedicating over 70 percent of their income to it. The right number rests somewhere in the middle of these two point estimates, meaning that in 2013 between 50 and 70 percent of poor renting families spent half of their income on housing and between 25 and 50 percent spent at least 70 percent on it.
The number of renter households dedicating less than 30 percent of family income to housing costs fell from 1.3 million in 1991 to 1.07 million in 2013, even as the total renter households grew by almost 6.3 million during that time. During those same years, the number of renter households dedicating 70 percent or more of their income to housing costs grew from 2.4 million to 4.7 million (if you include households reporting housing cost burden in excess of 100 percent of family income) or from 901,000 to 1.3 million (if you exclude those households).
Housing costs include contract rent, utilities, property insurance, and mobile-home park fees. Here, income refers to the sum of all wages, salaries, benefits, and some in-kind aid (food stamps) for the householder, relatives living under the same roof, and a “primary individual” living in the same household but unrelated to the householder. When calculating housing burden, the AHS chose to use this income measure, called family income, over household income to “approximate whose income may be available for housing and other shared living expenses.” (The AHS poverty status definitions, however, are based on household income.) See Frederick Eggers and Fouad Moumen, Investigating Very High Rent Burdens Among Renters in the American Housing Survey (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2010); Barry Steffen, Worst Case Housing Needs 2011: Report to Congress (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2013).
4. Milwaukee County Eviction Records, 2003–2007, and GeoLytics Population Estimates, 2003–2007; Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. For a detailed explanation of the methodology, see Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 88–133; Matthew Desmond and Tracey Shollenberger, “Forced Displacement from Rental Housing: Prevalence and Neighborhood Consequences,” Demography, forthcoming. Throughout this book, I use custom design weights to facilitate estimates generalizable to Milwaukee’s rental population. All descriptive statistics that draw on the Milwaukee Area Renters Study are weighted.
The American Housing Survey (AHS) collects data on the reasons renters relocated with the question, “What are the reasons you moved from your last residence?” and reports this information with respect to the most recent move of renters who moved within the previous year. According to the 2009 AHS (Table 4-11), among renters nationwide who had moved in the past year, between 2.1 and 5.5 percent were forced from their previous unit on account of private displacement (e.g., owner moved into unit, converted to condominium), government displacement (e.g., unit was found unfit for occupancy), or eviction. (The 2.1 percent estimate is based on renters’ reported “main reason for moving,” which is too limiting because those who were involuntarily displaced but listed another factor as their “main” reason for moving [e.g., poor housing conditions] would be excluded from this figure. The 5.5 percent estimate is based on all reasons given for moving, which may double-count some renters who report multiple kinds of forced moves. The most appropriate measure, therefore, is somewhere between the two point estimates.) According to the Milwaukee Area Renters Study (2009–2011), 10.8 percent of the most recent moves of renters who had moved within the previous year were forced. My estimate is larger—and more accurate—because MARS captured informal evictions. When informal evictions were excluded, my estimate drops to 3 percent, which aligns with the AHS estimate. The AHS, along with most material-hardship studies, significantly underestimates the prevalence of involuntary removal among renters by relying on open-ended questions that do not adequately capture informal evictions that many renters do not consider to be “evictions.”
5. The national estimates about the proportion of poor renting families being unable to pay all of their rent and believing they soon would be evicted come from the American Housing Survey, 2013, Table S-08-RO, which also reported that over 2.8 million renting households in the US believed it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that they would be evicted within the next two months. Chester Hartman and David Robinson (“Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem,” Housing Policy Debate 14 [2003]: 461–501, 461) estimate that the number of Americans evicted every year “is likely in the many millions.” See also Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997), 53.
With respect to statewide eviction estimates: The Neighborhood Law Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School has begun to record state-level eviction filings. (Eviction filings [being called to eviction court] are different from eviction judgments [being ordered to move out by court order]. In all cities, there are more filings than judgments. My estimate of Milwaukee’s formal, court-ordered eviction rate is based on judgments, which is a much harder metric to obtain and validate in other cities.) In 2012, the numbers broke down like this: Alabama, 22,824 evictions filed in court (pop. 4.8 million); Minnesota, 22,165 evictions filed in court (pop. 5.4 million); Oregon, 23,452 evictions filed in court (pop. 3.9 million); Washington, 18,060 evictions filed in court (pop. 6.9 million); Wisconsin, 28,533 evictions filed in court (pop. 5.7 million). See the epilogue for eviction estimates in cities other than Milwaukee. On measuring involuntary displacement, see Desmond and Shollenberger, “Forced Displacement from Rental Housing”; Hartman and Robinson, “Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem.”
1. THE BUSINESS OF OWNING THE CITY
1. The median annual household income among Milwaukee renters is $30,398, almost $5,500 lower than that of the city’s overall population. See Nicolas Retsinas and Eric Belsky, Revisiting Rental Housing (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press and the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2008).
2. Where you bought in the city depended on who you were, especially when it came to race. Milwaukee landlords were more likely than not to share their tenants’ racial or ethnic identity. Most white tenants in the city (87 percent) rented from white landlords; and most black tenants (51 percent) rented from black landlords. Overall, the majority of tenants in Milwaukee (63 percent) rented from a white landlord. But almost 1 in 5 rented from a black landlord, while almost 1 in 9 rented from a Hispanic landlord.
Among Hispanic renters, roughly half rented from Hispanic landlords and half from white landlords, and 41 percent of Hispanic renters in Milwaukee believed their landlord was born outside the United States. Landlording had long been a way for immigrants to break into the American middle class. In the early twentieth century, Polish immigrants in Milwaukee took to jacking up their houses, building basement apartments, and renting them out. As the South Side of Milwaukee transitioned from Polish to Hispanic, immigrants from Mexico and Puerto Rico became the ones renting out those “Polish Flats.” See John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee, 3rd ed. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2008 [1999]), 173.