10. Although unequal in status, male landlords and their male tenants, both having been socialized to the rhythms and postures of masculinity, could engage one another in ways they could each understand. Among landlords represented in Milwaukee’s eviction records, men outnumber women almost 3 to 1. Milwaukee County eviction court records, 2003–2007.
11. I observed some men avoid their landlords after receiving an eviction notice, just as I witnessed some women confront their landlords after receiving one. But because of the powerful ways gender guides interaction, providing individuals with expectations about appropriate ways to behave, a woman who aggressively confronted a landlord commonly was branded rude or out of line. This may be why Bob Helfgott, a landlord of twenty years who owned dozens of properties in poor neighborhoods, believed lesbians to be difficult tenants. “The gay women,” he said with a sigh. “That angry dyke thing, it drives me crazy. They’re just terrible. Always complaining.” See Cecilia Ridgeway, “Interaction and the Conservation of Gender Inequality: Considering Employment,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 218–35.
12. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 107, 110.
13. Tobin and Lenny had had enough. But it is important to recognize that Larraine had nearly avoided eviction, as she had in the past, by borrowing money from a family member. Petitioning acquaintances, friends, or family members for help sometimes worked. But this was less often the case for black women. If black women “ducked and dodged” more than their white counterparts, the reason was that their social networks tended to be far more resource-deprived. Because white women tended to be connected to more people in better positions to help, they were more likely to avoid eviction. See Colleen Heflin and Mary Pattillo, “Poverty in the Family: Race, Siblings, and Socioeconomic Heterogeneity,” Social Science Research 35 (2006): 804–22; Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 88–133.
14. I did not personally witness this event. The scene was reconstructed through multiple interviews with Larraine, Dave Brittain, some members of the moving crew, and other trailer park residents.
15. Thanks to a new law (Wisconsin Act 76, Senate Bill 179), Wisconsin landlords now may dispose of evicted tenants’ things in whatever manner they see fit. They now have the option of removing tenants’ personal belongings themselves and are no longer required to store them. When the law was being debated, the Brittain brothers dipped into their personal savings to support constituents mobilizing against its passage. But they were up against big money. The Apartment Association of Southwestern Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Realtors, and the Wisconsin Apartment Association joined forces to support the bill they had helped craft. As one commenter put it: “This new law will benefit landlords and ‘good’ tenants. ‘Bad’ tenants (i.e., those that don’t pay rent on time…) will not like this new law.” See Tristan Pettit, “ACT 76—Wisconsin’s New Landlord-Tenant Law—Part 1: Background and Overview,” Tristan’s Landlord-Tenant Law (blog), November 21, 2013.
10. HYPES FOR HIRE
1. The declaration “I keep to myself” is commonly heard throughout poor communities. The practice of actually keeping to oneself is not commonly seen in those communities. Alexandra Murphy plumbs this tension in her paper “?‘I Stay to Myself’: What People Say Versus What They Do in a Poor Black Neighborhood,” working paper, University of Michigan, Department of Sociology.
2. Most work on the underground economy focuses on the drug trade or sex work. But for every kid slinging dope or every prostitute on the stroll, there must be dozens and dozens of formally unemployed men working for cash or reduced rent, preparing landlords’ properties. On the blurry line separating the formal and informal economy in American cities, see Sudhir Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
11. THE ’HOOD IS GOOD
1. Researchers and legal scholars typically speculate that rents respond to market pressures (a city’s vacancy rate) or policy interventions (providing legal aid). But sometimes landlords raise rents when they intuit that tenants can pay more. If Ricky One Leg couldn’t pay, Belinda could. As Sherrena would say: “Ricky’s in for a rude awakening. His rent is going up. I don’t care. He can move….Because I’m sure Belinda’s going to have some more…tenants. I’m taking his rent up fifty bucks.”
2. Technically, gross rent may exceed the FMR payment standard if voucher holders are willing to pay the difference and if the unit passes rent reasonableness inspection.
3. Deborah Devine, Housing Choice Voucher Location Patterns: Implications for Participant and Neighborhood Welfare (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2003); George Galster, “Consequences from the Redistribution of Urban Poverty During the 1990s: A Cautionary Tale,” Economic Development Quarterly 19 (2005): 119–25.
4. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011; US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Final FY 2008 Fair Market Rent Documentation System.
5. Robert Collinson and Peter Ganong, “Incidence and Price Discrimination: Evidence from Housing Vouchers,” working paper, Harvard University and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2014; Eva Rosen, The Rise of the Horizontal Ghetto: Poverty in a Post–Public Housing Era, PhD diss. (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2014).
6. The Milwaukee Area Renters Study offered a unique opportunity to investigate if voucher holders were being overcharged because the sample included assisted and unassisted renters. Working with Kristin Perkins, I merged addresses represented in the Milwaukee Area Renters Study data set with property records. Doing so provided detailed information on housing quality, including square footage, building age, assessed value per square foot, building type (duplex, single-family), amenities (fireplace, air-conditioning, garage), and housing problems. We also gathered several measures of neighborhood quality, including an area’s poverty rate, racial composition, and median home value. Next, we controlled for neighborhood amenities like the distance to the nearest park, bus stop, and grocery store, as well as the average test scores for the school to which the address was zoned. A run of demographic variables about the renters was also included. Hedonic regression models estimated a significant relationship between holding a voucher and rent, with the voucher premium being an additional $49 to $70 a month, depending on model specification. Voucher holders also experienced more housing problems, which casts doubt on the idea that their higher rents reflect newer appliances or other perks not captured in the data. (For full models, see Matthew Desmond and Kristin Perkins, “Are Landlords Overcharging Voucher Holders?,” working paper, Harvard University, June 2015.) In 2010, 5,455 households in Milwaukee subsidized their housing costs with a rent-reducing voucher. Taking the results of our primary model, which includes 27 control variables and finds a $55 monthly rent premium for voucher holders, we estimate that the Housing Choice Voucher Program costs an additional $3.6 million each year in Milwaukee alone ($55 × 12 months × 5,455 vouchers). According to the City of Milwaukee, the average per-unit cost for a voucher-assisted household was $511 per month in 2010, or $6,126 a year. Dividing $3.6 million by $6,126 comes to roughly 588 additional families who could have been provided assistance if voucher holders were not overcharged. Some real estate manuals now include sections documenting profits that can be made from renting to voucher holders. See, e.g., Carleton H. Sheets, Real Estate: The World’s Greatest Wealth Builder (Chicago: Bonus Books, 1998), 121.