8. Single mothers like Arleen could not make ends meet on welfare alone: on average, welfare, food stamps, and SSI payments covered only about three-fifths of single mothers’ expenses. Even after attempting to make up the difference by working side jobs and seeking help from agencies, many endured severe hardship, going hungry or forgoing winter clothing and medical care. Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997).
9. See, for example, Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), 73; Sandra Susan Smith, Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism Among the Black Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007). For an extended treatment, see Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor.” Other ethnographers have documented similar network dynamics in poor neighborhoods: see Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 163–65, 182; Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls, 73. Of course, these dynamics can be observed at all levels of society. The tendency to rely on perfect strangers for emotional comfort, for example, is fairly common among the middle class, as evidenced by the so-called “stranger on a plane” phenomenon. Although poor people’s strategy of relying on disposable ties is not different in kind from the tendency of rich people to rely on strangers, it often is different in degree. It is only the poor who routinely rely on disposable ties to meet basic human needs.
10. People see neighborhoods as much more than school districts and the usual ecological indicators. They see things much too personal to quantify but powerful enough to attract them to or repel them from entire sections of the city.
11. Crystal had allowed her food stamps to lapse after her grandmother died the year before. She remembered her grandmother’s death causing her to fall into a dark depression. “I didn’t do shit. Sleep all day. Get in the shower. Eat. Go back in the house and go back to sleep. I shut down—on everything and everybody.” It was another example of how a trauma exacerbated poverty.
12. That is, Crystal used an insult in place of Jori’s name.
13. E-24
1. On the North Side, white landlords often hired black property managers. Said Sherrena, “There’s a lot of white boys [who] come down from Brookfield here, and they buy all this inner-city shit….And they will hire a black property manager to handle things for them….The white boy will hire a black guy, maybe that looks a little mean and can keep up stuff, and they’ll bawl ’em. It’s easy.” Sherrena meant the property manager would not hesitate to yell at tenants (“bawl them out”) if they didn’t pay up. See Jennifer Lee, “Cultural Brokers: Race-Based Hiring in Inner-City Neighborhoods,” American Behavioral Scientist 41 (1998): 927–37.
2. Mortgage and release records were retrieved from the Milwaukee County Register of Deeds.
3. Tobin and Lenny’s rent records showed that during most months five trailers sat empty and forty tenants were behind, the average amount owed in a month being $340. Five vacancies a month left 126 trailers paying an average of $550 in monthly rent. Subtract from that total missed rent payments in the amount of $163,200 (40 × $340 × 12). This reduction was probably too drastic for two reasons. First, Tobin did not carry out anything close to forty evictions a month; so most people found a way to satisfy their debts. Second, missing payment estimates were based on summer-month totals (the trailer park’s rent rolls from April to July 2008) when nonpayments and evictions spiked. Nevertheless, I have kept these likely inflated reductions to generate a conservative estimate. Tobin’s overhead consisted of Lenny and Susie, whose combined annual salaries and rent reductions ran just shy of $50,000. Lenny’s annual salary and rent waiver totaled $42,600 ($36,000 + $6,600), and Susie’s salary and rent reduction totaled $6,400. (Tobin considered Susie a part-time employee, whom he paid $5 an hour for twenty hours a week; or: [$5/hr × 20 hours × 52] + $1,200 in reduced rent.) With respect to maintenance, all but twenty trailers were “owned,” which meant tenants footed most repair bills. Estimated regular maintenance costs rarely exceeded $5,000 a month, even after accounting for money paid for grass cutting and litter pickup. But I have kept this likely inflated estimate as well. Tobin’s property taxes were $49,457 in 2008, and his water bill was $26,708 that year. (Both figures were pulled from public records.) Tenants paid gas and electricity. Eviction court costs? Tobin averaged three formal evictions a month, and didn’t use a lawyer unless cases got tricky, which would mean he paid less than $7,000 a year in eviction court, sheriff, and lawyer fees. (If Tobin evicted an average of three tenants a month, then his annual baseline court costs could come to $3,222 [$89.50 × 3 cases × 12 months]. I doubled that number to account for irregular sheriff, mover, and lawyer fees and rounded up to $7,000.) Trash? Lenny told me that the bill for managing the two Dumpsters ran $800 a month (or $9,600 a year). Lighting? Tobin paid for the outdoor lighting (installed to utility poles) that lit the trailer park at night. Using We Energies standard rates, I budgeted $5,000 a year for this expense (plus the office’s electricity bill). Incidentals? I budgeted an additional $15,000 for advertisements and Lenny’s rent-collection bonuses. That leaves $446,635 a year. I excluded large, one-time maintenance expenses from this calculation—like when Tobin had speed bumps installed within the park—because they were rare and irregular. Lenny thought my estimate was too low. He believed Tobin took home “more like six hundred thousand” a year.
14. HIGH TOLERANCE
1. John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee, 3rd ed. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2008 [1999]), 174.
2. In my experience, disadvantaged neighborhoods were characterized not by the presence of an “oppositional culture” as much as by a palpable lack of one.
3. Robert Fogelson, The Great Rent Wars: New York, 1917–1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 85, 86.
4. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979), 12, 4.
5. Fogelson, Great Rent Wars, 88.
6. This finding is based on a negative binomial regression model applied to the full Milwaukee Area Renters Study (2009–2011) sample. To measure “community support,” respondents were asked if they ever had helped someone in their current neighborhood (a) pay bills or buy groceries, (b) get a job, (c) fix their housing or car, (d) by supporting them emotionally, or (e) by watching their children. Neighborhood disadvantage was measured by a factor-loaded scale composed of median household income, violent crime rate, and the percentages of families below the poverty line, of the population under eighteen, of residents with less than a high school education, of residents receiving public assistance, and of vacant housing units. In a paper with Weihua An, I found neighborhood disadvantage to be positively associated with community support, net of income, education, residential mobility, race, age, gender, employment status, and network composition. Residents in disadvantaged neighborhoods with strong ties to homeowners and the college educated were just as likely to offer support to their neighbors as those who lacked such ties. This suggests the strong presence of local gift exchange in distressed neighborhoods, one relatively unaffected by the composition of people’s extended networks. See Matthew Desmond and Weihua An, “Neighborhood and Network Disadvantage Among Urban Renters,” Sociological Science 2 (2015): 329–50.
7. Support systems that arise organically in poor neighborhoods help people eat and cope, but they also expose them to heavy doses of trauma and sometimes violence. Bruce Western, “Lifetimes of Violence in a Sample of Released Prisoners,” Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences, forthcoming.