Our Eviction Epidemic: Matthew Desmond and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

I have always been really troubled by the amount of poverty in America. Americans are matched in their rich democracy with the depth and expanse of poverty. That’s really always unsettled me. So I wanted to get as close as I could and try to understand that from a ground level. I wanted to know how housing is deeply implicated in that problem, how housing is causing poverty in America today. So I started by moving into a trailer park on the south side of Milwaukee, and I lived in that trailer for about five months. Then I moved into a rooming house on the north side of Milwaukee, which is a traditional inner-city, predominantly African-American neighborhood, and I lived in that rooming house for about ten months. From those two places, I followed families that were getting evicted and the landlords doing the evicting. If you were getting evicted, I went to court with you, followed you into abandoned shelters and houses. I went to Iowa with one family, Texas with another family, and also just tried a new tradition, Adrian — to deeply embed myself into their everyday lives. I went to funerals with folks. Slept at their houses. Ate meals at their table. I was there for a birth. Like I said, I wanted to get as close to the landlords doing the evicting as the families, too. So I saw landlords buy property, sell properties, pass out eviction notices, and collect rents, and tried to really plumb the complications of that relationship that defines the lives of so many families today.
ANL: There’s one thing I would like to get off my chest: I feel it’s almost sacrilegious to ask you questions, in a way. I’ve been given this incredible meal to eat, and before I apprehend it, or lift the fork, I’m asking, “ “What can I eat tomorrow and down the road?” There is so much to absorb in your book. And I choose the word “sacrilegious” quite intentionally: I’ve been reading a lot about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. My work threw me into a kind of spiritual crisis–how to co-exist with the personal experience of doing the work, the public commodification of the work, and navigating as a trusty usher of such information into the wider world and yet stay true to myself. I couldn’t really figure it out, and I’m still in the process of doing that. Your book really helped me a lot, so I just want to say that I feel so grateful. Not only is there so much in the book, but you have a very rigorous methodological explanation of how you actually did the work, which is essential reading for anybody.

I’m just going to read this passage, because you say it better than anyone could. This is at the end of the methodological note: “The harder feat for any field-worker is not getting in. It’s leaving. And the more difficult ethical dilemma is not how to respond when asked to help, but how to respond when you are given so much. I have been blessed by countless acts of generosity from the people I met in Milwaukee. Each one reminds how gracefully they refused to be reduced to their hardships. Poverty has not prevailed against their deep humanity.”

When you do this kind of committed research, people often ask how you got in, how you got people to trust you. You are certainly welcome to answer those, but I wondered if you might talk a little about your process of leaving, or the transition to this moment here.
MD: With every question I want to ask back: What do you think? What was your experience?
ANL: I went to stand-up comedy. That’s how I ended up. I went to a bar, and I saw comedians, and I thought, I will stay here for a while.
[caption id="attachment_68191" align="alignright" width="213"] Matthew Desmond[/caption]
MD: The bar was involved in my process as well. When I left Milwaukee, and I had all these stories. I felt so responsible for people. It’s a heck of a thing to do, to try to write someone’s story. So I decided to kind of dive down again in my own way by just not rushing to write. So I pored over my field notes — like 5,000 single-spaced pages — and read them over and over and over again. When I was walking to work or working out or rocking my kid to sleep, I would be listening to recordings from Milwaukee. I wanted to hear people’s voices again. I wanted to be there again, in a way. I felt that I needed to do that to let these stories sink in in a deep way, so that when I wrote about people I didn’t just write about them in the light or represent only the hard parts about them, because I knew that they would be disappointed in that, that they would say, “That’s not me; that’s not only me.” So I felt that I needed to be able to write about them as full people. Which goes for the landlords, too. So to do that, I thought I needed to spend a lot of time with those words and with those actions in this kind of obsessive way. That really helped with the transition.
It was weird, though. It was weird leaving. And it was weird going to a place like Cambridge, Massachusetts…
ANL: Weird on any day, probably.
MD: Yes. It was kind of depressing. I think I wrestled with that for a while. Because the work was heartbreaking. Seeing this level of suffering had a deep impact on me. But people’s generosity, too, and their humor, and their heart left a deep impact on me, too.
There’s a story in the book that I like to tell about this, which is: There are these two women, Vonetta and Crystal, and they are homeless, and they were at this McDonald’s, and this boy walks in, and the boy is like nine or ten. He doesn’t go up to order. He goes around to the table; he’s looking for scraps. These two women, who are homeless, who met at a homeless shelter, turn to one another and Crystal says, “Yo, what you got?” They pool their money, and they go to this boy and buy him lunch, and Crystal gives him a big, giant hug, and sends him on his way.
This was kind of overwhelming to me. It just shows that we are reducing people born for better things.
ANL: I remember once a young woman — not in the book I wrote, but in another story I was struggling with how to write about her — She was very much in my life. She said to me: “I have to live through this; the least that you can do is write about it.” She said it as a real rally to help me. It was not as judgmental as it seems, but it really helped me a lot, because I thought, That’s when I’m supposed to do here; there’s a kind of collective rooting for you, I think, to do it.
Here’s a two-part question. You wrote about Postmodernist ethnography about the first person, the use of “I” as a way through the research of a story—something I’m very interested in and becoming increasingly suspicious of in a lot of ways. Yet so many of these stories of systemic injustice, inequality, racism, are told really through the power of character, the actual people in nonfiction. I wonder about any thoughts you have on that.
Second part: You have many characters –Sherrina, and Ramona, all these people, these amazing people you won’t forget–getting equal time at the same level as the systems story. In journalism, I compare the challenge to those recipes when you’re trying to get your kids to eat vegetables, and you wrap the broccoli in a brownie. I feel as a journalist: “I’ve got to get the broccoli in there, but I have to give them a brownie.” That brownie is character, getting people to empathize with an actual person so I can then get the systemic information across. You really have the two working together. I learned so much about the actual nature of housing policy, about rent, and you kept that information very vivid. So I wonder if you could talk about the narrative. You’re obviously a sociologist, so that’s a special treat to get that information in a way that’s readable.
It’s a really high-wire act to keep readers reading who aren’t specialists in that field, and then also to impart a lot of information in a way that you really remember it. It made me understand things that I’d been struggling to apprehend for decades, really, that I’d witnessed on a daily basis and I thought, Oh, that’s connected to that; I see how that relates to that. For example, evictions, which I’ve witnessed many of; I was so struck by how non-reactive people were. I was so upset, I was so emotional, and I found them so devastating, and people were very blasé. I later came to understand that was a reaction that I thought was quite traumatized and numbed.
MD: That reaction is among one of the saddest things, I think. I remember at the end of the book there’s an eviction that Arleen goes through. Arleen was a single mom that I met. She was trying to raise two boys. When I met her, she was paying 88 percent of her income to live in a very run-down two-bedroom apartment in a very poor neighborhood. We see Arleen get evicted again and again throughout the book. Under those circumstances, when you’re paying so much of what little you have just on rent, just a little thing can throw you off. Her kid hits a car with a snowball, the guy jumps out, kicks in the door — that leads to an eviction. Further into the book we see her evicted again, and we see Jafaris, who is her six-year-old, come home from school and come upon this scene. There’s all these movers at her house, and they’re tossing it out, and she’s confused, she didn’t know they were coming, and he walks in from school, and he just . . . He looks around. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t run and get a special toy. He just turns around and walks out the door.
That should disturb us, right? Evictions used to be rare in this country. They used to draw crowds. There are scenes in literature where you can come upon an eviction — like, in Invisible Man there’s the famous eviction scene in Harlem, and people are gathered around, and they move the family back in. That used to happen here. But now we’ve grown used to it, and we have kids like Jafaris who are experiencing this dramatic, violent upheaval at home and don’t react.
Writing about that, chronicling that, bearing witness to that for me is deeply connected to reform. Especially in the sociological tradition, in the housing tradition even, there are examples there. So we can go back to someone like Michael Harrington in The Other America, who wrote about poor folks, and those stories helped launch the War on Poverty. Or we can go back to someone like Jacob Riis, the muckraking journalist who was writing about tenements in this city, and just showing people the despair and the squalor, and how that led to New York taking on the slums and winning that battle.
So I feel like there’s something there, and I feel like there’s a deep connection with stories and with empathy, and how that moves.
There’s also this other work that I did, and we’ve already had some luck changing the law because of this work. One of the chapters in here is about these pretty crazy laws called Nuisance Ordinances that hold landlords accountable for their tenants’ behavior. They are based on excessive 911 calls. The only reason I know about these is because I went to landlords and I said, “It seems that women are getting evicted more than men; what’s going on.” One of the things they said is, “You’ve got to look into these ordinances, because a lot of these calls are being made from domestic violence victims.” I said, “What do you do when you get a nuisance letter from the city?” “We evict the tenant; that’s what we do.”
So I was just trying to fact-check this. So I went to the Milwaukee PD, and I said, “I need two years worth of your nuisance ordinances,” and they said, “Go away.” Then I said, “Here’s my lawyer friend, and can we get them now, please.” So they handed over to us all the data, I crunched the numbers, and we found that, yes, the third most popular nuisance in the city of Milwaukee was domestic violence. When landlords got a letter that’s basically, like, “Your property is a nuisance,” in over 80 percent of the cases they evicted the tenant. So we were putting these women in this devil’s bargain where we’re saying, “Either call 911 for his conviction, or don’t pick up the phone and risk more abuse.” So we took that data that was hard-won, that started from fieldwork, to the Milwaukee PD. They changed their law, so now they can’t do that any more. We took it to Norristown, Pennsylvania; they changed their law. We’re kind of taking that on the road. So I feel like at least there’s one example of how a story can lead to a bigger effort that can lead to real reform.
ANL: Also, when Arleen’s son is having an asthma attack and she calls 911, it again threatens her tenancy.
MD: Yes, that’s right. That was based on these nuisance laws. That shows how tenuous a grasp people like Arleen have on their housing. I think that maybe we went out into the streets and we asked folks on the streets, “Why do you think people get evicted?” some folks would say, “Well, it’s hard out there,” but some folks would say, “People make bad decisions. People are spending unwisely, they’re being irresponsible.” But with someone like Arleen, giving almost everything she had just on rent . . . forget, like, heat and utilities, just rent . . . It’s not the result of, like, irresponsibility as much as inevitability. A very small thing, like calling for an asthma attack, can lead to getting thrown out.
ANL: You talked also about the increased risk that children pose to stable tenancy.
MD: Yes.
ANL: I wonder if you could talk about that. All these issues afflict children egregiously. Yet there is still this idea that in some way children are buffers, or that their well-being is the driving concern. The way children are shown to operate in the eviction process was very helpful in figuring out ways to frame policy arguments—that children really increase the risk of actually being evicted in the way the system works now.
MD: If you go to a place like the South Bronx Housing Court, you know what the face of the eviction epidemic looks like. It’s filled with kids, just kids everywhere in the South Bronx Housing Court. They used to have a daycare in the South Bronx Housing Court because there were so many kids in it. When I started this work, I kind of thought, like, kids would shield families from eviction, that there would be some sort of extra protection that kids would receive. But the extra protection they receive in Milwaukee is, if you have a dependent child, you get two extra days, and that’s it.
ANL: I know.
MD: There’s this scene in the book where Arleen finally finds this house, after calling and applying for ninety places. She calls and she calls and she calls, and finally two months after her eviction court hearing she settles into this house, and she moves everything in. It’s, like, nice. All the cupboards have handles, and all the lights have fixtures. She calls it her “nice house.” She just sits down on the floor after she moves in, and she finds this garbage bag with like towels, and just leans against that, and her fourteen-year-old, Jori, like leans against her, and Jafaris puts his little six-year-old head on her lap, and they just sit like that for a long time.
But then Jafaris gets an asthma attack, and she calls. The landlord gets on her. Then Jori acts out at school. It’s hard to be fourteen. It’s hard to be fourteen and experience long stretches of homelessness and bounce between all these schools. I think between seventh and eighth grade, Jori went to five different schools. One day a teacher snapped at him. He kicked her in the shin. Instead of calling the principal, the teacher calls the police. The police visit Arleen.
This is something you see on the ground level, like in that story. It’s also something we see in statistics. We talked to 250 people in eviction court because we wanted to know, “Why do you get evicted but you don’t?” What we found was like, you can hold costs on how much you owe your landlord, your household income, things like race and gender — but what really matters is: Do you live with kids? If you live with kids, your chances of getting an eviction judgment in court triple. What you’re seeing there isn’t the judge or the court commissioner. You’re seeing the landlord saying, “I’ll work with you if you don’t have kids. If you have kids, I don’t think I’ll work with you.”
Kids are something that absolutely exposes families to more evictions. So why? Why is that? From a landlord’s point of view, kids are bad for the bottom line. They can flush their toys down the toilet. They can cause a guy who’s just been thwacked with a snowball to kick your door in. Young kids can test positive for lead poisoning that can be EPA-ordered. Teenagers can attract the attention of the police. In the words of one landlord I met, “Kids cause me headache.” So that’s what we’re seeing.
ANL: As people have eviction in their histories you describe how they’re moved to more and more dangerous neighborhoods, and I think children are increasingly playing indoors because it’s less safe to be outside. There are so many things that are constantly working in a way that’s destructive to any kind of basic, as you say, human right of just shelter and well-being.
MD: When I started this work, I thought that eviction would allow me to tell a different story about poverty. But I’ve come to the conclusion that eviction is absolutely a cause, not just a condition of poverty. It’s a wellspring for all these social problems. So eviction comes with a record. And we know that a criminal record can make you have a hard time on the labor market, can prevent you from seeking government assistance. The eviction record operates in the same way. A lot of landlords will turn you away. Public housing authorities also turn you away often if you have an eviction record. Which means we’re systematically denying housing assistance to people that need it the most — the evicted. That’s why families move from bad neighborhoods to even worse neighborhoods; they move from crummy housing to sub-standard housing.
People often not only lose their homes but also their communities and their possessions. A lot of times their possessions are either thrown out of the home or they’re taken by movers and locked in bonded storage, and you can’t get them back unless you keep up the payments, and some people just can’t, so they just get thrown out. The biggest moving company in Milwaukee that does evictions told me that 70 percent of their eviction or foreclosure moves just get thrown in the dump.
We have really good evidence that eviction causes job loss. If any of you in this room have been through an eviction, you know exactly why. It’s this ridiculously consuming, stressful, overwhelming event that can cause you to make mistakes at work and eventually lose hold of your job.
Then there’s the toll that eviction takes on your spirit. I think that goes back to what you saw in the South Bronx, what I saw in Milwaukee — these non-reactions. They kind of betray a deeper emotional trauma. We have good evidence that moms, two years after they were evicted, are more depressed. We know that suicides attributed to evictions or foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010.
You add all that up. Take that full picture into account, and it’s really hard not to conclude that eviction is not just, you know, a bad day, but it’s fundamentally changing the face of poverty. It’s casting people in a different and more difficult path.
ANL: You also, I feel, use this very pungent terminology to describe the dynamic of what’s going on. You talk about exploitation. You show how people profit very directly from these policies and these ways of managing the poor—everything from the landlords managing the properties to the way Housing Court works. You also talk about the violence of eviction.
MD: Yes.
ANL: There’s a passage where you talk about how much conversation there is about incarceration and people being on parole and probation, and various things in poor neighborhoods, but if you look at the numbers, everybody has a landlord. It’s always a struggle to figure out how to sell stories and get publications to publish stories without demonizing people around poverty issues–it’s a very tricky business. Your book shows that housing is one way to begin to do that. You said that yourself, when you started to look at it, you thought, “surely there must be lots of sociology or ethnography around this,’ and you started to do the secondary research and you found that there hadn’t been that much outside of the work done on public housing.
MD: It was weird. Here I am, living in a trailer park, and here’s the private market, and I’m meeting all these people, and they’re giving 70 percent of their income to rent, 80 percent of their income to rent. So I’m just like, What do we know about this? We didn’t know a whole heck of a lot. We had spent so much time focused on public housing, where the minority of low-income families are living today, that we ignore this big sector that is defining the lives of poor families in their communities. Do you think that most Americans, unless they have direct experience with these issues, still think the typical low-income family benefits in some way from public housing? I think one out of four public housing units in America are in this city. But this city is weird in that way. You guys are weird. Most cities don’t have the public housing stock that you guys do. So only about one in four families that qualify for any kind of housing assistance receive it. In big cities like D.C., the waiting list for public housing is not counted in years; it’s counted in decades. So a young single mom with a baby might be a grandma by the time her application comes up.
That’s the situation we’re in. And there are so many more questions we need to get after.