8. Some screening techniques were not mentioned that Saturday morning. One landlord, whose father was also a landlord, told me he uses the following strategy: Upon receiving an application from a woman with children, he looks first not at her income or previous residence but at the emergency contacts. “If they list a mother and a father, I know I won’t have any trouble with the lease.” But if she lists just a mother, he then looks at the applicant’s last name. If it differs from her mother’s, he infers the applicant is divorced or remarried, a plus. If the surnames match, he considers the applicant a single mother by a single mother—and usually turns her down.
9. This is a very different way of understanding how certain people get sorted into certain neighborhoods, compared to conventional perspectives—one that pays attention to the people doing the sorting: the landlords. For the Chicago School, the city was a space of sentiments and its pattern of physical and social segregation primarily the result of tens of thousands of individual decisions based on where one best fits. “In the long run,” wrote Robert Park, “every individual finds somewhere among the varied manifestations of city life the sort of environment in which he expands or feels at ease.” See Robert Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” in The City, eds. Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 41. The sentimental neighborhood, like the plant habitat on which the urban ecology perspective was based, becomes for all purposes sentient, drawing to it those who belong. R. D. McKenzie would explain residential sorting as being steered by “a selective or magnetic force [emanating from various neighborhoods] attracting to itself appropriate population elements and repelling incongruous units, thus making for biological and cultural subdivisions of a city’s population.” R. D. McKenzie, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community,” in Park, Burgess, and McKenzie, eds., The City, 63–79, 78.
The most influential perspective on residential mobility—the residential attainment model—is deeply influenced by the Chicago School’s vision of mobility and neighborhood sorting. But those working within this tradition substitute the Chicago School’s emphasis on sentimentality and morality with one focused on instrumentality and economic advancement. The residential attainment model perceives mobility as a result of social climbing and views the city not as a patchwork of isolated moral worlds but as a geography of advantage and disadvantage. According to this perspective, when people move, they try to move up, parlaying economic capital for residential capital. See John Logan and Richard Alba, “Locational Returns to Human Capital: Minority Access to Suburban Community Resources,” Demography 30 (1993): 243–68; Scott South and Kyle Crowder, “Escaping Distressed Neighborhoods: Individual, Community, and Metropolitan Influences,” American Journal of Sociology 102 (1997): 1040–84.
What each perspective overlooks is the crucial fact that urban neighborhoods are markets, largely owned, in the case of the inner city, by those who do not live within their borders. Consequentially, market actors in general—and landlords, in particular—should be seen as central players in our theories of neighborhood selection and mobility. See John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 33–34.
10. On neighborhood variation, see Robert Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Peter St. Jean, Pockets of Crime: Broken Windows, Collective Efficacy, and the Criminal Point of View (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
11. See John Caskey, Fringe Banking: Check-Cashing Outlets, Pawnshops, and the Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013); Gary Rivlin, Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. (New York: Harper, 2010).
8. CHRISTMAS IN ROOM 400
1. Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 88–133.
2. In 2013, Milwaukee County processed almost 64,000 civil cases, roughly double the number of its criminal cases. Nationwide, the incoming civil caseload in 2010 was 13.8 million, compared to 10.6 million criminal cases. Wisconsin Circuit Court, Caseload Summary by Responsible Court Official, County Wide Report (Madison, WI: Wisconsin Courts, 2014). Court Statistics Project, National Civil and Criminal Caseloads and Civil/Criminal Court Caseloads: Total Caseloads (Williamsburg, VA: National Center for State Courts, 2010).
3. One Milwaukee landlord who owned roughly 100 units in low-income neighborhoods told me he gave approximately 30 percent of his tenants five-day eviction notices each month. A $50 late fee accompanied each notice. He estimated that 90 percent of those cases were settled via stipulation; the remaining 10 percent were evicted. This meant that he collected roughly $1,350 in late fees each month from tenants he did not evict. That amounted to over $16,000 a year in late fees alone.
4. Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011. In addition to surveying tenants, interviewers took eviction court attendance every weekday (save one) between January 17 and February 26, 2011. During this six-week period, in 945 out of 1,328 cases, tenants did not appear in court, with most receiving an eviction judgment. Of those that did appear in court, slightly more than one-third signed stipulation agreements. Some would later be evicted; some would not. One-quarter had to return to court on another day, owing to paperwork errors or because their case was complicated enough to be sent to a judge. Twelve percent had their cases dismissed. The remaining 29 percent received eviction judgments.
Documented default rates in other cities and states range from 35 percent to over 90 percent. See Randy Gerchick, “No Easy Way Out: Making the Summary Eviction Process a Fairer and More Efficient Alternative to Landlord Self-Help,” UCLA Law Review 41 (1994): 759–837; Erik Larson, “Case Characteristics and Defendant Tenant Default in a Housing Court,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 3 (2006): 121–44; David Caplovitz, Consumers in Trouble: A Study of Debtors in Default (New York: The Free Press, 1974).
5. With Jonathan Mijs, I combined all eviction court records between January 17 and February 26, 2011 (the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study period) with information about aspects of tenants’ neighborhoods, procured after geocoding the addresses that appeared in the eviction records. Working with the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, I also calculated the distance (in drive miles and time) between tenants’ addresses and the courthouse. Then I constructed a statistical model that attempted to explain the likelihood of a tenant appearing in court based on aspects of that tenant’s case and her or his neighborhood. The model generated only null findings. How much a tenant owed a landlord, her commute time to the courthouse, her gender—none of these factors were significantly related to appearing in court. I also investigated whether several aspects of a tenant’s neighborhood—e.g., its eviction, poverty, and crime rates—mattered when it came to explaining defaults. None did. None of the explanatory variables I tried were statistically associated with showing up to eviction court. The absence of a clear pattern in the data implies that defaults are more or less random. Other studies have arrived at similar conclusions, as have the housing specialists at Community Advocates. One told me: “As for going down to the courthouse…well, they have to eat; they’ve got to ride the bus; got to find someone to watch their kids. Everything is pretty much driven by the moment.” See Barbara Bezdek, “Silence in the Court: Participation and Subordination of Poor Tenants’ Voices in Legal Process,” Hofstra Law Review 20 (1992): 533–608; Larson, “Case Characteristics and Defendant Tenant Default in a Housing Court.”