7. Charles Orlebeke, “The Evolution of Low-Income Housing Policy, 1949 to 1999,” Housing Policy Debate 11 (2000): 489–520, 502.
8. When Congress was debating the Taft-Ellender-Wagner bill, which would eventually become the Housing Act of 1949, the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards called public housing “the cutting edge of the Communist front.” The association waged a fierce battle—it funded radio appeals, penned editorials, and rallied its members to call their congressman—and might have won if the construction industry and its union, eager to pour concrete, hadn’t flexed their muscle. The act passed by five votes. If it had not, federal provisions for public housing would have disappeared. See Louis Winnick, “The Triumph of Housing Allowance Programs: How a Fundamental Policy Conflict Was Resolved,” Cityscape 1 (1995): 95–118, 101; Lawrence Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 238–41.
When real estate developers in the mid-twentieth century backed public housing efforts to release coveted urban land for private enterprise, they were more the exception than the rule. Plus, those developers did not support public housing per se; they viewed it as a necessary vehicle through which to execute slum clearance and land grabs. Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 104–34.
9. See Philip Tegeler, Michael Hanley, and Judith Liben, “Transforming Section 8: Using Federal Housing Subsidies to Promote Individual Housing Choice and Desegregation,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 30 (1995): 451–86; Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, Pub. L. No. 93–383, § 101(a)(1), (c)(6), 88 Stat. 633, 633–34.
10. On foreclosures of rental property, see Gabe Treves, California Renters in the Foreclosure Crisis, Third Annual Report (San Francisco: Tenants Together, 2011); Vicki Been and Allegra Glashausser, “Tenants: Innocent Victims of the Foreclosure Crisis,” Albany Government Law Review 2 (2009); Matthew Desmond, “Housing Crisis in the Inner City,” Chicago Tribune, April 18, 2010; and Craig Karmin, Robbie Whelan, and Jeannette Neumann, “Rental Market’s Big Buyers,” Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2012. Real estate investment manuals promoted investing in foreclosed and damaged properties long before the crash. “Distressed properties can literally make you rich,” one advised in 1998. “Banks don’t like foreclosures. But real estate investors do, because foreclosures can be quick bargain buys.” Sheets, Real Estate, 231, 234.
11. Dwight Jaffee, Anthony Lynch, Matthew Richardson, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, “Mortgage Organization and Securitization in the Financial Crisis,” in Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System, eds. Viral Acharya and Matthew Richardson (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 61–82.
12. Kenneth Harney, “Even with Great Credit and Big Down Payment, Home Loans Will Cost More in 2011,” Washington Post, January 8, 2011.
13. By one estimate, foreclosure discounts are on average 27 percent of the value of the property. John Campbell, Stefano Giglio, and Parag Pathak, “Forced Sales and House Prices,” American Economic Review 101 (2011): 2108–121.
14. I wasn’t there when the door fell on Ruby and then Doreen. Later, I did see the door off its hinges and Doreen’s swollen foot and confirmed this story with several Hinkstons.
12. DISPOSABLE TIES
1. This was done so that the apartment would not sit vacant for any amount of time.
2. I did not personally witness this event but reconstructed the scene after speaking with Arleen, Crystal, and Sherrena.
3. A recent study estimated that between one-third and a half of youths aging out of foster care experience homelessness by the time they turn twenty-six. Amy Dworsky, Laura Napolitano, and Mark Courtney, “Homelessness During the Transition from Foster Care to Adulthood,” American Journal of Public Health 103 (2013): S318–23.
4. During everyday conversation, people in the trailer park and the inner city claimed to have no friends or an abundance of them, to be surrounded by supportive kin or estranged from them. Oftentimes, depending on their mood, their accounts of social ties and support varied widely from one day to the next. I came to view these accounts skeptically, interpreting them as a kind of data in their own right but not as accurate evaluations of people’s social relationships. Problems arose not only when determining who was in someone’s network but also when asking what those people did. Because giving increases your sense of self-worth and receiving diminishes it—ladling soup at the Salvation Army evokes a very different feeling from having it ladled into your bowl—there is good reason to expect people will overestimate the amount of support they give and underestimate the amount they receive. Ethnography allowed me to distinguish accounts of action from the action itself, and eviction, moreover, provided a unique occasion to compare what people said about the support they received from friends and family with support they actually received during that time of crisis. Eviction had a way of quickening ties, testing relationships, and revealing commitments, thereby drawing to the surface what was often submerged below the level of observation. Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2012): 1295–335.
5. Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 93, 33, 43.
6. Public programs like SSI and food stamps continue to incentivize living alone. If you live under another’s roof and eat at her or his table, your SSI income is reduced by one-third. Larger households receive more food stamps—but not as much as members of that household would receive if they lived separately. For example, a couple that registered as a household could receive a maximum of $347 a month to spend on food. A couple that registered separately could receive a maximum of $189 a month each, or $378 combined. With some exceptions, everyone living together must apply to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, rather than separately. See US Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Applicants and Recipients, December 30, 2013. On SSI living-arrangement requirements, see US Social Security Administration, “Simplifying the Supplemental Security Income Program: Options for Eliminating the Counting of In-Kind Support and Maintenance,” Social Security Bulletin 68 (November 4, 2008); Brendan O’Flaherty, Making Room: The Economics of Homelessness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 222. On kin dependence and AFDC, see M. Lisette Lopez and Carol Stack, “Social Capital and the Culture of Power: Lessons from the Field,” in Social Capital and Poor Communities, eds. Susan Saegert et al. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 31–59. Milwaukee renters receiving SSI have lower levels of crowding than their counterparts, even after controlling for income. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.
7. When it came to meeting basic needs, poor kin had always been greater assets than middle-class relatives. See Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor”; Stack, All Our Kin, 77–78.