An invisible crisis in plain sight: the emergence of the "eviction economy," its causes, and the possibilities for reform in legal regulation and education.

• Author: Dana, David A.
• Position: Book review

EVICTED: POVERTY AND PROFIT IN THE AMERICAN CITY. BY MATTHEW Desmond. New York: Crown Publishers. 2016. Pp. xi, 341. $28.

INTRODUCTION

In Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond (1) explores the lives of landlords who evict and tenants who are evicted in poor neighborhoods of Milwaukee. While the book could be understood as simply an ethnography of a handful of landlords and their low-income tenants in one mid-sized American city, it is much more. Evicted, read in conjunction with Desmond's prior scholarship, illustrates the emergence of what I call an "Eviction Economy" in our cities--an economy in which eviction of the poor is not exceptional, but rather the norm, part of landlords' business models and poor people's way of life. The greatest achievement of Evicted is that it makes this Eviction Economy, and the terrible human and societal toll it takes, visible to a broad audience. However, as much as it provides a compelling descriptive account of the Eviction Economy, Evicted is not fully persuasive in its explanation of the rise of the Eviction Economy. In particular, Desmond's argument that the Eviction Economy is caused by landlords' charging exploitative rents is conceptually and empirically problematic. As a response to the Eviction Economy, Desmond primarily calls for a robust universal voucher program, which would indeed address the lack of supply of affordable housing. But the political feasibility of such a program is questionable. Evicted does not address less sweeping reforms that could be both politically feasible and effective in limiting the scope and harmful effects of the Eviction Economy.

Part I of this Review summarizes Evicted and discusses what makes it such a remarkable achievement. Part II addresses the question of why the Eviction Economy has arisen and the problems in Desmond's causal explanation. Part III addresses Desmond's universal voucher reform proposal and outlines three reforms that Desmond does not explicitly advocate but that might be both politically feasible and effective in empowering low-income tenants.

1. MAKING THE EVICTION ECONOMY VISIBLE

   Foreclosure--and not eviction--has been the housing crisis that has dominated public discourse in recent years. When the housing market and the accompanying securitization market collapsed beginning in 2007, everyone took note. The waves of foreclosures that resulted from the dramatic drop in home values drew the attention of national and local media, courts and lawyers, legal scholars and (to an extent) legislatures. (2) At a minimum, the foreclosure crisis was visible to everyone.

   And yet, as Evicted teaches us, there is another phenomenon in the housing market worthy of the label "crisis" that (to date) has attracted almost no attention from media, courts, lawyers, legal scholars, or legislatures. Unlike the foreclosure crisis, the crisis Desmond describes, using both survey research and an ethnographic account, involves low-income, urban individuals who lose possession of their rental premises, rather than losing possession of homes they owned in fee simple. (3) These low-income tenants are disproportionately African American women with children (p. 98). And unlike the foreclosure crisis, the crisis Desmond describes does not seem to be a transitory or transitional phenomenon but rather a new, permanent part of the urban economy. While there was always reason to think the foreclosure crisis would abate as prices stabilized and lenders adopted stricter underwriting, nothing in Evicted suggests that the eviction crisis will necessarily diminish in due course.

   The part of the housing economy Desmond describes, which I call the Eviction Economy (Desmond does not use that label), is a private market economy: the tenants in the Eviction Economy do not live in public housing and have not been able to access housing subsidies in the form of Section 8 vouchers, for which there are very long waiting lists in most areas (pp. 59-60, 223-24). As Desmond explains, most people who qualify for public housing or housing vouchers due to poverty do not in fact receive public housing or housing vouchers (pp. 59, 302-03). Quite the contrary, "[t]hree in four families who qualified for [housing] assistance receive[] nothing" (p. 59). These tenants face a private rental market in which even low-quality housing rents can consume as much as 80 to 90 percent of their monthly income, (4) and that is in months in which they do not face some unusual interruption in their flow of income. These tenants are one relative's funeral expense or lost shift at work away from falling behind on their rent; in fact, they are often unable to make their rent, and thus are regularly subject to the threat of eviction for non-payment. These tenants know that a formal eviction on an individual's record makes finding decent new housing much, much more difficult. They understand that an eviction record is like a criminal conviction record--a stain that marks an individual as undesirable for a range of purposes. Landlords of course also understand this and know that they can often compel tenants in arrears to leave the premises simply by threatening to bring a formal eviction for nonpayment of rent. Landlords build informal and formal eviction into their business model, into the rents they charge, and into the way they maintain (or do not maintain) their properties. In the Eviction Economy, informal and formal eviction is not unusual; it is not the result of some extraordinary happening. Eviction is entirely the norm.

   Desmond explains that this Eviction Economy is terrible not just for the tenants who are part of it but also for the neighborhoods and cities in which these tenants live. Eviction translates into insecurity, feelings of powerlessness, and depression for poor people who desperately need stability in their lives. Desmond explains, "Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers" (p. 298). Eviction deprives people of an ability to develop and maintain attachments to a residence, to neighbors, even to personal belongings (which are often lost in eviction); it perpetuates severely substandard housing conditions and intensifies the concentration of poverty and racial segregation and all its attendant ills; and it undermines poor people's efforts to gain and maintain employment, and to provide their children something like a stable education and a sense of agency. (5) Recurrent displacement through eviction "contribute[s] directly to what [Jane] Jacobs called 'perpetual slums,' churning environments with high rates of turnover and even higher rates of resentment and disinvestment" (p. 70). Eviction, Desmond argues, reflects poverty, but it is also, at least in our urban neighborhoods, a cause of poverty in its own right (p. 295). "Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation" (p. 299).

   Desmond argues that this Eviction Economy in our cities is a relatively new phenomenon. He argues that "evictions used to be rare" (p. 3) and were heavily resisted by tenants, even to the point of sparking riots (pp. 3-4). On this score, however, Desmond seems to lack quantitative data, and perhaps it would be impossible to develop such data. (6) As discussed below, however, there are good reasons to suppose that recurrent eviction of the poor is a product of relatively recent phenomena.

   In documenting the current magnitude of the Eviction Economy, Desmond begins with court records from his test city, Milwaukee, to derive a rate of formal eviction and the demographics of those who are formally evicted. (7) Drawing on an in-person survey of renter households throughout Milwaukee, Desmond finds that the rate of informal plus formal evictions is much higher than the rate of formal evictions (pp. 330-31, 344-45). As Desmond writes, one in eight Milwaukee renters experienced at least one forced move in the two years prior to being surveyed, with 48 percent of those forced moves being informal evictions and 24 percent being formal evictions (pp. 4-5, 330-31). Thus, about 8 percent or about 1 in 12 tenants were formally or informally evicted within a two-year period. Scholars have not yet sought to assess informal eviction rates in other cities, but Desmond points out that "Milwaukee is a fairly typical midsize metropolitan area with a fairly typical socioeconomic profile and housing market and fairly typical renter protections" (p. 333). And nationwide survey evidence that Desmond cites supports the view that "1 in 8 poor renting families ... were unable to pay all of their rent, and a similar number thought it was likely they would be evicted soon" (p. 5).

   Desmond also documents that African American mothers with children suffer the most in the Eviction Economy. The most harrowing, and maddening, account in Evicted is that of an African American mother named Arleen and her two sons who are repeatedly displaced, with no cheerful ending suggested at the end of their travails (pp. 282-92). Desmond's quantitative evidence suggests that Arleen's story is commonplace. As Desmond explains, women from black neighborhoods made up 9 percent of Milwaukee's population but 30 percent of its formally evicted tenants (p. 98). Poor African American men are not being evicted as frequently as African American women (p. 99), perhaps because they are caught up in a crisis of their own--mass incarercation. As Desmond writes, "[i]f incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women" (p. 98).

   One question Evicted immediately raises is, how it is possible that the emergence of the Eviction Economy has escaped media and scholarly and political attention? How has it remained in effect invisible to people outside poor, urban neighborhoods? How can it be that there...