8. The majority of public housing residents are either disabled or elderly. On the rise of elderly housing, see Lawrence Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 285–90. On the composition of public housing residents, see Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), chapter 6.
9. The practice of denying housing assistance to people based on eviction records and other civil proceedings raises a number of serious concerns. As Larraine learned, court records can be inaccurate; they can display wrongful evictions; and they can reflect landlord discretion, which can have a disparate effect on certain groups like single mothers and victims of domestic abuse. On questionable standards of accuracy in civil court records, see Rudy Kleysteuber, “Tenant Screening Thirty Years Later: A Statutory Proposal to Protect Public Records,” Yale Law Journal 116 (2006): 1344–88; David Thacher, “The Rise of Criminal Background Screening in Rental Housing,” Law and Social Inquiry 33 (2008): 5–30.
10. The poverty debate could do more to recognize the powerful effects of rejection on a person’s self-confidence and stamina. Applying for an apartment or job and being turned down ten, twenty, forty times—it can wear you out. Theories about neighborhood selection or joblessness often assume low-income people are more or less “rational actors” who recognize trade-offs and make clear choices. The reality is that many are “exhausted settlers” who accept poor housing in a disadvantaged neighborhood or a dead-end or illicit job after becoming depleted and disheartened from trying and trying and failing and failing. The shame of rejection not only can pressure people to accept undesirable circumstances today; it can also discourage them from striving for something better tomorrow. On the experience of rejection when job hunting for entry-level work, see Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapter 4; Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (New York: Vintage, 1999), chapter 3.
11. Some months later, Betty received a letter from Tobin threatening eviction for boarding Larraine. Larraine responded by paying Tobin what he said she owed in back rent and court costs. That amount was twice what the court records said Larraine owed. This caused Larraine to fall so far behind with Eagle Moving that she lost everything she had stored with them. Her furniture, photographs, and layaway jewelry were bought at a public sale for who knows what by some bargain hunter or thrown in the dump.
19. LITTLE
1. Housing insecurity is an important source of employment insecurity among low-income workers. Applying matching techniques as well as discrete hazard models to the Milwaukee Area Renters Study data set with Carl Gershenson, I found low-wage workers who involuntarily lost their homes to be significantly more likely to lose their jobs. When we examined the effects of forced removal for renters with relatively stable work histories and those with fairly unstable employment, we found forced removal to be an actuator of job loss for both groups. Matthew Desmond and Carl Gershenson, “Housing and Employment Insecurity Among the Working Poor,” Social Problems, forthcoming.
2. Consider Tina’s story. A single mother of three, Tina worked part-time for a landscaping company, entering data and making customer-service calls. After serving her an eviction notice, Tobin began calling Tina’s work and threatening to carry out the eviction unless she paid him $600. (Tina claimed to owe only $100.) Fighting the eviction, Tina attended several court hearings, sometimes missing work to do so. While her case was still pending, sheriff deputies and an Eagle Moving crew appeared at her trailer. Tina’s teenage daughter held them off until she arrived and explained her situation. Tina began looking for another place to live but was turned away by several landlords on account of her open eviction case and poor credit. Soon, Tina’s job performance began to falter. Depressed and overwhelmed, she began calling in sick. At work, she began making mistakes, like forgetting to enter service calls into the system, which she attributed to the stress of her eviction case. One day at the office, Tina broke down sobbing at her desk as coworkers and supervisors looked on. A judge would agree that Tina was being overcharged, but she still was evicted. Afterward, she began relying on friends and casual acquaintances for shelter, eventually moving with her daughters into a house owned by a man who showed a romantic interest in her. His house was considerably farther away from Tina’s workplace, and her car was unreliable. This situation played a role in increasing her lateness and absenteeism. In late fall, Tina was laid off. Tina’s case reveals multiple mechanisms linking eviction to job loss. The consuming and disruptive nature of the eviction caused her to miss work and negatively affected her job performance. Moving under duress and with little control over her circumstances, Tina relocated farther away from her employer, which increased her risk of tardiness and no-showing. And her dependency on a casual acquaintance for shelter introduced a new set of interpersonal complications and demands.
3. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 53.
4. These mothers were writing to apply for public housing in Detroit between 1946 and 1948. Detroit Housing Commission, “Children Not Wanted”: The Story of Detroit’s Housing Shortage Victims Told in Their Own Words (Detroit: Detroit Housing Commission, 1948).
5. Jim Buchanan, Fair Housing and Families: Discrimination Against Children, Public Administration Series, Bibliography, P1732 (Monticello: Vance Bibliographies, 1985).
6. Mary Ellen Colten and Robert Marans, “Restrictive Rental Practices and Their Impact on Families,” Population Research and Policy Review 1 (1982): 43–58, 49.
7. Edward Allen, “Six Years After Passage of the Fair Housing Amendments Act: Discrimination Against Families with Children,” Administrative Law Journal of American University 9 (1995): 297–359.
8. Unlike with discrimination based on race or gender, most Americans do not even realize that discrimination against children is illegal. Rigel Oliveri, “Is Acquisition Everything? Protecting the Rights of Occupants Under the Fair Housing Act,” Harvard Civil Rights–Liberties Law Review 43 (2008): 1–64, 5. A report based on a nationwide sample of Americans found that the majority of respondents recognized discrimination based on race, religion, and ability to be illegal, but only 38 percent were “aware that it is illegal to treat households with children differently from households without children.” See Martin Abravanel and Mary Cunningham, How Much Do We Know? Public Awareness of the Nation’s Fair Housing Laws (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2002), 10. See also US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Live Free: Annual Report on Fair Housing (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2010). Fair Housing of Marin, Discrimination Against Families with Children in Rental Housing (San Rafael: Fair Housing of Marin, 2002); Gulf Coast Fair Housing Center, An Audit Report on Race and Family Status Discrimination in the Mississippi Gulf Coast Rental Housing Market (Gulfport: Gulf Coast Fair Housing Center, 2004).
9. Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011.