1. For the full models and methodology, see Matthew Desmond, Carl Gershenson, and Barbara Kiviat, “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters,” Social Service Review 89 (2015): 227–62. Tenants represented in the Milwaukee Area Renters Study were classified as having experienced long-term housing problems if they suffered any of the following issues the year prior to being interviewed: (a) a broken stove or other appliance, (b) a broken window, (c) a broken exterior door or lock, (d) mice, rats, or other pests, or (e) exposed wires or other electrical problems for at least three days as well as (f) no heat, (g) no running water, or (h) stopped-up plumbing for at least 24 hours. To estimate the effect of a forced move on housing quality, we used doubly robust regression models that employed coarsened exact matching. Vouchered tenants were included in these analyses.
2. While involuntary displacement by definition causes residential instability, the impact of a forced move on residential instability can last beyond the relocation immediately following eviction. Housing dissatisfaction is the key mechanism linking eviction’s direct (involuntary) move and its subsequent indirect (voluntary) one, as forced movers relocating under duress often accept subpar housing but then seek to move to better conditions. An analysis of the Milwaukee Area Renters Study that employed doubly robust regression on a data set processed by coarsened exact matching found that renters who experienced a forced move were 24 percentage points more likely to undertake an unforced move soon thereafter, compared to those who did not experience involuntary displacement. Additionally, 53 percent of renters who experienced a forced move followed by an unforced move attributed their latest move to a desire to move to a better housing unit or neighborhood, while only 34 percent of renters with two consecutive unforced moves did so. In other words, unforced movers whose previous move was involuntary were far more likely to cite housing or neighborhood problems as the reason for moving than were unforced movers whose previous move was also unforced. Not only do poor renters disproportionately experience involuntary displacement, but involuntary displacement itself brings about subsequent residential mobility. See Desmond et al., “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters.”
3. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 31–32; Robert Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), especially 127, 146–47, 151, 177, 231–32. For an ethnographic take on the uses of public space, see Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).
4. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 271, emphasis mine.
5. This strategy, if it was that, backfired when tenants didn’t report housing problems that bit into Sherrena and Quentin’s bottom line, like a running toilet.
6. Landlords were required to disclose code violations before entering into a rental agreement with prospective tenants. City of Milwaukee, Landlord Training Program: Keeping Illegal and Destructive Activity Out of Rental Property, 7th ed. (Milwaukee: City of Milwaukee, Department of Neighborhood Services, 2006), 12; Wisconsin Administrative Code, ATCP134.04, “Disclosure Requirements.”
7. Housing problems motivate a significant number of moves among Milwaukee renters. Consider “responsive moves,” which are neither forced displacements (e.g., eviction, building condemnation) nor completely voluntary relocations (to gain residential advantage) but something in between. Data from the Milwaukee Area Renters Study reveal that the most common type of responsive move among Milwaukee renters between 2009 and 2011 was that initiated by a housing problem. These moves accounted for 23 percent of responsive moves and 7 percent of all moves undertaken by renters in the two years prior to being surveyed. These moves were not motivated by a positive impulse (moving to a bigger apartment) but by a negative one (the need to leave units after housing conditions deteriorated). See Desmond et al., “Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters.”
8. As thousands of underwater homeowners learned when the housing bubble popped, defaulting can be far more rational than throwing money into a black hole. Timothy Riddiough and Steve Wyatt, “Strategic Default, Workout, and Commercial Mortgage Valuation,” Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics 9 (1994): 5–22; Lindsay Owens, “Intrinsically Advantaged? Middle-Class (Dis)advantage in the Case of Home Mortgage Modification,” Social Forces 93 (2015): 1185–209.
9. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. Between 2009 and 2011, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $550; for a three-bedroom it was $775.
The professionalization of the rental market, combined with the spread of information technology, may have contributed to compressing rents within cities through either competition or price coordination. Large-scale property managers often rely on products with names like Rainmaker LRO, RentPush, and RENTmaximizer—complex algorithms that draw on hundreds of current and historical market indicators to adjust lease prices daily, even hourly. The RENTmaximizer, used in over 8 million residential units worldwide, offers property owners “higher revenue by quicker adjustments to market conditions” (www.yardi.com). For do-it-yourself types, how-to real estate books advised landlords to conduct monthly market surveys. “You call nearby complexes and check out what their rental rates are to make sure you are not too high and not too low,” writes Bryan Chavis in Buy It, Rent It, Profit! Make Money as a Landlord in Any Real Estate Market (New York: Touchstone, 2009), 51. Picking up the phone was an extra measure, since several websites stood ready to report whether an apartment was above or below rent in the surrounding area (www.rentometer.com).
10. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011; merged with neighborhood-level data from the American Community Survey (2006–2010) and Milwaukee Police Department crime records (2009–2011). Consider one other statistic: the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $575 in Milwaukee’s most dangerous neighborhoods (those at or above the 75th percentile in violent crime rate) and $600 in its least dangerous (those at or below the 25th percentile in violent crime rate).
11. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 11; Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 24–26; Joe William Trotter Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 179; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 54; Marcus Anthony Hunter, Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 80.
12. According to the Community Advocates rent abatement guidelines at the time of this fieldwork, a tenant could withhold 5 percent for no door or if the apartment was infested with roaches; 10 percent for a broken toilet; and 25 percent for no heat.
13. Landlords with vacant units could lower their rent, but some would prefer the vacancy. Sherrena once showed a prospective tenant, a truck driver, a ground-floor unit in a four-family complex. It had sat empty for two months. The man looked at the patches of carpet a dog had mangled, fingered the unhinged cupboards, squeaked his shoe on the grimy kitchen floor. “This just isn’t the kind of living I’m used to,” he said. “How about $380?”
“No way,” Sherrena responded, offended.
Collecting $380 would have been better than collecting nothing for that particular unit—but not if it meant that rent for everyone else in the building would drop. The three other units in the complex were occupied with tenants paying $600 a month. If Sherrena took the truck driver’s deal, the other tenants would learn about it and likely demand a similar rate. If she allowed it, her take-home would be less than it was renting three units at $600. If she refused, some tenants might leave, causing more vacancies. Sherrena showed the truck driver out and locked the door behind him.