14. Forty-four percent, to be exact. Serious and lasting housing problems are defined above (chapter 6, note 1). Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.
15. Comparing two-bedroom units in the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. In the 1970s and 1980s, rents increased primarily because housing quality did; see Christopher Jencks, The Homeless (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 84–89. But since then, housing quality across America had remained virtually unchanged—if anything, the 2000s saw small declines in quality nationwide—while rents shot up. According to the American Housing Survey, there were approximately 909,000 renter-occupied units with severe physical problems in 1993. That number increased to 1.2 million by 2011. The proportion of all rental households with severe physical problems has remained flat over the last two decades (at roughly 3 percent). The same is true for other measures of housing quality. For example, in 1993, 9 percent of renters reported being “uncomfortably cold for 24 hours or more” because the heating broke. In 2011, 10 percent did. During the 2000s, rental housing across America did not undergo drastic improvements that kept pace with rent increases.
16. When those properties stopped cashing out, because they amassed too many fines or required costly repairs, Sherrena would “let ’em go back to the city.” This meant she would simply stop paying taxes on those properties until the city eventually took control of them through tax foreclosures. Sherrena shielded herself from any personal liability by registering each of her properties under a different Limited Liability Company (LLC). In the eyes of the law, it was the company, not Sherrena, that defaulted. Milwaukee saw between 1,100 and 1,200 properties go into tax foreclosure every year. When the city inherited these used-up and discarded houses, it sold or demolished them, further shrinking the affordable housing stock. For Sherrena, losing property this way was not a mistake or the result of a financial setback. It was a basic part of her business model. “When I get tired of a property,” she said, “I just let it go. Why would you keep throwing good money at the bad?”
Sherrena created LLCs online, through the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions (DFI). The DFI records a registered agent for each LLC but not owner names or Wisconsin tax information (www.wdfi.org). The estimates for the number of tax foreclosures in Milwaukee come from Kevin Sullivan, Assistant City Attorney (personal communication, August 13, 2015).
Policymakers and researchers focused on poor people’s housing, most of whom have never set foot in an apartment like Doreen’s, often point out that America has made impressive strides toward improving housing quality for its poor. “The affordability of housing is today of far greater concern than physical condition or crowding,” Alex Schwartz writes, echoing the prevailing view (Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 2nd ed. [New York: Routledge, 2010], 26). This view is not wrong, but it gives the impression that the two problems are independent of each other; that since cities have razed tenements and criminalized lead paint, it is now time to confront the lack of affordable housing. But the two problems—poor housing conditions and high costs—are interlocked. At the bottom of the housing market, each permits the other.
17. Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 72; Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 46–47; Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson, Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), chapter 2.
18. The sociologist Linda Burton refers to the process of young people being prematurely exposed to the world of adults as “childhood adultification.” See Linda Burton, “Childhood Adultification in Economically Disadvantaged Families: A Conceptual Model,” Family Relations 56 (2007): 329–45.
19. I didn’t witness this, but I did see the broken table and discussed the matter with Doreen, Patrice, Natasha, and Patrice’s children. This is how Patrice’s ten-year-old son, Mikey, interpreted that event: “You know, some people just be stressed. Everybody gets stressed, gets mad sometimes. And they was stressed and just had to let it out.” He said it made him feel “embarrassed because of how it makes our family look, as a unit.”
7. THE SICK
1. Since the early 1990s, opioid prescriptions have tripled in the United States, as have overdoses. Centers for Disease Control, Policy Impact: Prescription Pain Killer Overdoses (Washington, DC: Centers for Disease Control, 2011); National Institutes of Health, Analysis of Opioid Prescription Practices Finds Areas of Concern (Washington, DC: NIH News, US Department of Health and Human Services, 2011).
2. Stacey Mayes and Marcus Ferrone, “Transdermal System for the Management of Acute Postoperative Pain,” Annals of Pharmacotherapy 40 (2006): 2178–86.
3. This quotation and other events of Scott’s drug use during his time as a nurse come from the record of Scott’s disciplinary proceedings in front of the Wisconsin Board of Nursing. I corroborated the details with Scott.
4. See Wisconsin Statutes 19.31–19.39 and 59.20(3).
5. 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).
6. RentGrow has since become Yardi Resident Screening, which offers “terrorist, drug trafficker, sex offender, and Social Security fraud screening” (www.yardi.com). In the United States there are approximately 650 tenant-screening companies. Although these reports are often riddled with errors, landlords increasingly have come to rely on them. See Rudy Kleysteuber, “Tenant Screening Thirty Years Later: A Statutory Proposal to Protect Public Records,” Yale Law Journal 116 (2006): 1344–88; Matthew Callanan, “Protecting the Unconvicted: Limiting Iowa’s Rights to Public Access in Search of Greater Protection for Criminal Defendants Whose Charges Do Not End in Convictions,” Iowa Law Review 98 (2013): 1275–308.
7. “These tenants, a lot of them it’s like pigs in a dollhouse,” Wilbur Bush told me. An older African American man with a flattop, leather jacket, and gold crucifix, Bush had been a landlord since the 1960s. Bush personally inspected applicants’ current apartments, making sure to open the refrigerator. (I accompanied him on apartment screening visits and sat in his office as he interviewed tenants.) “So what you’re doing here, if you can relate,” he continued, “you’re trying to get the best of the worst….Because I’ve been in places where it’s an upward climb to zero.”