7. Most of what we know about people’s acceptance or rejection of racial integration comes from vignette studies that take place in a lab. These studies consistently find blacks to be strong proponents of integration and whites to be advocates of segregation. One paper found that most black participants reported their ideal neighborhood to be half black and half white, while most white participants said they would move from such a neighborhood. If you step out of the lab and watch families search for housing in real time, you see something different and more unsettling. White movers have strong aversions to living in black neighborhoods—but so do black movers. I never once heard a black renter voice a desire to move into an “integrated neighborhood,” although they would be contributing to racial integration simply by moving from a majority-black neighborhood. Instead, I heard them speak of a desire to “get away from these black motherfuckers,” as Crystal did. When Arleen was house hunting outside the inner city, she once said, “The only people I have a problem with is people my own color.” Natasha once said, “Black people don’t know how to act….If I had a choice, I would move out there [to the suburbs] too! Ain’t nobody want to stay out here, and you hear gunshots all the time.” In these sentiments you don’t find a (positive) desire for integration but a (negative) repulsion directed at majority-black communities. For vignette studies about racial preferences, see Reynolds Farley et al., “Stereotypes and Segregation: Neighborhoods in the Detroit Area,” American Journal of Sociology 100 (1994): 750–80; Reynolds Farley et al., “Chocolate City, Vanilla Suburbs: Will the Trend Toward Racially Separate Communities Continue?,” Social Science Research 7 (1978): 319–44.
8. Between 2009 and 2011, half of all Milwaukee renters found their housing through social networks, and 45 percent conducted the search themselves. Only about 5 percent of renters found housing through the Housing Authority or another social-service agency. With respect to renters who found housing on their own, roughly half of white renters relied on the Internet; an additional third found housing after spotting a rent sign. A third of black renters who looked for housing on their own found it through rent signs, and an additional third did so through the newspaper or other print media, like the RedBook. Fifteen percent looked online. For most black renters, looking for apartments was an un-digital affair. Fifty-eight percent of black renters found housing through social networks. The same was true for only 41 percent of white renters. The vast majority of tenants who located housing through network ties relied on kin and friends, with white renters almost twice as likely to rely on friends as family members. In sharp contrast to research on finding employment that suggests that black job seekers receive less help from social ties than other groups, evidence from the Milwaukee Area Renters Study finds black house seekers received more. Cf. Sandra Susan Smith, Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism Among the Black Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007).
9. According to the owner, Tim Ballering, Affordable Rentals owned 322 units and managed an additional 484 as of July 2014.
10. “Our government doesn’t need to exist to take care of the poor and hungry. That’s the Church’s job,” said Pastor Daryl, adored by Larraine. Conservative politicians often express similar beliefs. In 2013, Republican congressman Doug LaMalfa voiced a sentiment shared by many in his party when he argued that low-income Americans should be helped “through the church…because it comes from the heart, not from a badge or a mandate.” But after watching people like Larraine and Crystal seek help from their churches, you can’t help but wonder if our hearts are really big enough for people with such heavy and persistent needs, people who need a lot more than some groceries now and again, a few hundred dollars here and there. (“My knowledge of social work is next to zero,” Pastor Daryl said.) In the biblical telling, the early Church was able to uplift the poor only after believers “sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need” (Acts 2:44). Modern-day churchgoers have been less inclined to make such sacrifices. Pastor Daryl was frustrated by what he called Larraine’s “poverty mentality,” her inability to “buckle down” and “manage her finances.” Minister Barber often called Crystal and snapped at her for doing things eighteen-year-olds are prone to do, like staying out late. Both people of the cloth had extended help in the past, and both had reasons why they felt they should not extend help in the future. Government mandates and entitlements are far from perfect, but they are less dependent on the limits of human compassion. LaMalfa was quoted in Michael Hilzik, “Families on Food Stamps Would Suffer While Farms Get Fat,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2013. On the role today’s black church plays in the inner city, see Omar McRoberts, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). On religious experience, see Timothy Nelson, Every Time I Feel the Spirit: Religious Experience and Ritual in an African American Church (New York: NYU Press, 2004).
11. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Camille Zubrinsky Charles, “The Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 167–207.
12. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 417. See also Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1938).
13. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 199.
14. Mumford, City in History, 462–63; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]).
15. Landlords exercised this privilege to such an effective degree that judges were pressured to exempt some items from seizure, especially tools used to earn a living. Frank Enever, History of the Law of Distress for Rent and Damage Feasant (London: Routledge and Sons, 1931); David Caplovitz, The Poor Pay More (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 162–63.
16. Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2001), chapter 1.
17. In 1928, 99 percent of Milwaukee’s blacks rented. Joe William Trotter Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 70.
18. Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chapter 1; Marcus Anthony Hunter, Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), chapter 3; Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), chapter 8; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 51–55; Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 21.
19. Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 6; see also Spear, Black Chicago, 148; Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 180.
20. Michael Bennett, When Dreams Come True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America (McLean: Brassey’s Publishing, 1966); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005).
21. At 43 percent, blacks have the lowest homeownership rates in the country today. At 73 percent, whites have the highest. Robert Callis and Melissa Kresin, Residential Vacancies and Homeownership in the Third Quarter 2014 (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, October 2014), Table 7; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014.
22. Satter, Family Properties, 430n7.
23. Drawing on the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011, Tracey Shollenberger and I designed a lagged OLS model estimating renters’ current neighborhood poverty and crime rates, conditioning on their previous neighborhood poverty and crime rates. Examining the most recent move of all renters who moved sometime in the previous two years, we accounted for several important demographic factors—race, education, family structure, housing assistance—and several key life shocks potentially related to neighborhood selection: job loss, the birth of a child. Even after conditioning on a run of important factors and on previous neighborhood characteristics, experiencing a forced move is associated with more than one-third of a standard deviation increase in both neighborhood poverty and crime rate, relative to voluntary moves.
21. BIGHEADED BOY
1. Sherrena had charged Patrice “double damages.” Milwaukee landlords could bill tenants twice the rent for each day they remained on the property past the eviction notice expiration (704.27, Wis. Stats.). This was designed to help landlords recoup lost rental income when evicted tenants held up the property and prevented landlords from re-renting it. Sherrena usually didn’t do this, but she made an exception for Patrice. “Because she pissed us way off! Her mouth is too slick,” Sherrena said.