13. Between 2006 and 2010, Milwaukee Small Claims Court each year processed roughly 12,000 eviction cases but only 200 garnishments. I have excluded from this estimate garnishments in 2009, which for some reason were exceptionally high at 537. On eviction and garnishment filings, see State of Wisconsin, 2010 Annual Report: Milwaukee County Circuit Court, First Judicial District, 2. On garnishment and execution statutes, see Wisconsin Statues §814 and §815.
14. In Milwaukee’s Landlord Training course, landlords were strongly encouraged to docket judgments. “The most important thing I’m going to ask you to do is to spend an extra five dollars and docket that judgment with the clerk of courts,” instructor Karen Long advised. “You want to add it to the credit report so that everyone out there knows that they owe you money….I’m asking you to do it for all of us who need to run credit reports on people….And also a couple years from now you might get a call, saying, ‘I’m George Jones. Remember me?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Well, I was your tenant three years ago. You have a judgment against me for seven hundred and fifty bucks. I need to buy this car. Can I give you five hundred bucks and you call it even?’?” Karen went on to advise landlords to tell tenants about docketing: “I’m going to put this on your credit report, and nobody is going to lend you any money or lend you anything until you pay me. So it behooves you, you know, to not let any of this go on your record.”
15. Rent Recovery Service will report tenants to major credit bureaus even if landlords do not have money judgments (www.rentrecoveryservice.com).
16. In Milwaukee and many cities across the United States, the law offers few protections for tenants in arrears. “It’s the ‘what’ not the ‘why’ that matters,” the landlord saying goes. In other words, the court typically does not care why tenants fell behind, only that they did. Arleen could have articulated her housing problems clearly; she could have brought pictures. Doing so probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Once, upon learning that an elderly woman being evicted had lived without electricity for a month because her landlord was slow to repair the wiring, a court commissioner replied, “That isn’t necessarily a fact we need to work out today.” Another time, a housing court judge listened patiently as a tenant described sewage in her bathtub and rotting floorboards. Then he responded, “You’ve told me everything except that you are current on your rent.”
17. Tenants may have the right argument but the wrong presentation: too rough or meandering, too angry or meek. It would be na?ve to think these considerations are uninformed by class, gender, and racial dynamics between tenants, landlords, and court actors. In the Landlord Training course, property owners are told, “The person who gets the loudest, and the noisiest, and the feistiest loses. So bite your tongue and go through it.” And even if landlords are new to eviction, many are educated members of the middle class, just like the court clerks, commissioners, and judges, who on account of their similar class position all speak the same language and speak it in the same way.
18. Almost every landlord and building manager in Milwaukee that I met would agree. They felt that the court system was brazenly “pro-tenant,” that it resembled an “uneven playing field” tilted against property owners, or that commissioners liked to play Let’s Make a Deal when they should just be issuing writs of restitution. Lenny Lawson was the sole exception. The court system “used to be for the tenants. It’s not anymore,” he told me.
9. ORDER SOME CARRYOUT
1. According to Maudwella Kirkendoll, chief operating officer at Community Advocates (personal communication, December 19, 2014), 946 households benefited from the Homelessness Prevention Program in 2013. That year, the annual budget for that program was $646,000—all state-and city-distributed HUD dollars.
2. The notice the Sheriff’s Office sends to tenants states, “movers will not take food left in your refrigerator or freezer.” Movers do not take food to bonded storage, but they do place it on the curb.
3. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 129. On the psychology of scarcity, see Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having So Little Means So Much (New York: Times Books, 2013).
4. After the foreclosure crisis, several states passed laws requiring landlords to provide tenants in foreclosed properties with advance notice, and in May 2009 Congress passed the Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act, which requires landlords who acquire property through foreclosure to honor existing leases. But when riding along with Milwaukee’s eviction squad in 2014, I met several tenants who simply did not know who their landlord was. The foreclosure crisis has caused urban rental property to be shuffled through many institutions, real estate companies, property-management firms, and private investors, leaving tenants bewildered. See Vicki Been and Allegra Glashausser, “Tenants: Innocent Victims of the Foreclosure Crisis,” Albany Government Law Review 2 (2009): 1–28; Creola Johnson, “Renters Evicted En Masse: Collateral Damage Arising from the Subprime Foreclosure Crisis,” Florida Law Review 62 (2010): 975–1008.
5. Sheriff John and several movers told me about the eviction scenes listed in this paragraph.
6. Results from the Milwaukee Area Renters Study revealed that while some low-income families suffer from “double disadvantage,” living in distressed neighborhoods and being embedded in impoverished networks, others, to put it plainly, live in relatively bad neighborhoods but have good networks and still others live in relatively good neighborhoods but have bad networks. Matthew Desmond and Weihua An, “Neighborhood and Network Disadvantage Among Urban Renters,” Sociological Science 2 (2015): 329–50. 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), 189; Xavier de Souza Briggs, “Brown Kids in White Suburbs: Housing Mobility and the Many Faces of Social Capital,” Housing Policy Debate 9 (1998): 177–221; Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2012): 1295–335; Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 77–78.
7. Jacob Rugh and Douglas Massey, “Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis,” American Sociological Review 75 (2010): 629–51; Signe-Mary McKernan et al., Less Than Equal: Racial Disparities in Wealth Accumulation (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2013); Thomas Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede, and Sam Osoro, The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide (Waltham, MA: Institute for Assets and Social Policy, 2013).
8. According to Lenny’s rent rolls, the month Larraine fell behind, so did forty-seven other families in the trailer park. The least amount owed was $3.88; the largest debt was Britney’s.
9. When I asked landlords what factors informed their decision to move forward with an eviction, they typically provided canned answers that had to do with only the financial side of things. But as I learned after spending a considerable amount of time with landlords, the reality was much more messy and arbitrary.