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How the eviction process works in Las Vegas.

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Las Vegas has the highest foreclosure rate in the country and one of the highest unemployment rates. Bill Whitaker rides along with the Constable's office as they carry out the unenviable task of evicting people from their homes.

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Sherrena the landlord shows the keys to her properties.

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The very first thing that happens in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a book released earlier this week by Crown Publishers, is a young boy named Jori throws a snowball at a car. The occupant stops, gets out, chases the boy and his cousin back to Jori's apartment, breaks down the door, and leaves. The landlord finds out about the broken door and evicts Jori's mother, sending her and her two kids out into the Milwaukeewinter.

It's obvious why Dr. Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard and the book's author (as well as a MacArthur "genius grant" recipient), began his study of Milwaukee's rock-bottom housing market and the people attempting to navigate and profit off it with this anecdote. Over and over in the book, minor-seeming setbacks have a way of spiraling out of control. Drug tests and transportation problems and broken heaters and backed-up plumbing feed into one another in vicious ways, turning life for Milwaukee's most vulnerable citizens into a flurry of paperwork and short-term loans and appointments and, above all, repeated, desperate searches for suitable housing in a city that seems hell-bent on denyingit.

Evicted will likely inject some much-needed life into the debate over America's housing policies. But Desmond's zoomed-in approach - based on more than a year spent hanging around with both white and black residents of Milwaukee facing housing challenges, as well as landlords and the sheriffs and moving crews who evict people - also focuses on the psychological ravages of housing insecurity, on what it does to parents and children when they realize they are being batted around, from unit to drafty unit, at the whims of forces they can barelyunderstand.

In an interview with Science of Us, Desmond explained the psychological effects of housing stress, and also discussed why one of his subjects blew a month's worth of food stamps on crab legs and lobsters, the mistakes people make when they talk about ghetto or trailer-park "culture," and the lessons he learned from the controversial reception of Alice Goffman's On the Run: Fugitive Life in an AmericanCity.

One of your influences in writing this book was Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan's research, and their book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, which focuses on the many negative psychological and decision-making effects of being faced with prolonged scarcity. In what ways did you see poverty and housing insecurity rob your subjects of their ability to plan for the future?
The book focuses a lot on the consequences of eviction and housing insecurity in terms of things like the neighborhoods you live in or access to housing assistance. But there's also just the sheer cognitive load of a crisis, right? And so just spending time with tenants paying 50, 60, 70 percent of their income to housing, that takes an enormous amount of bandwidth, to use the term from .

It's consuming when you're thinking all the time, How am I going to make rent? If I miss rent, how can I avoid eviction? How can I work this out with my landlord? If you have housing problems and you have an antagonistic relationship with your landlord, that can be your life, and if anyone has ever been in that situation, it's really hard to think of other things, like going to community college, investing in your kids, investing in your neighborhood, when so much of your brain is focused on this very bare, basic humannecessity.

And then when you're in the middle of an eviction - a lot of folks who haven't been through an eviction, I think they have this image that it's a one-stop process, that it's a very bad day. But an eviction can be a long, drawn-out process; it can involve several court hearings, it can drag on for weeks, and that is such a consuming, stressful, intense experience that that takes a lot of bandwidth, too. So one of the interesting findings from this study - to me, at least - is that eviction is linked to job loss. You lose your home, you are much more likely to lose your job the year following. The reason for that comes back to the bandwidth problem: You're so focused on this event that you're making mistakes at work; you can relocate further from work, which can increase your tardiness and absenteeism and cause you to lose yourjob.

So I think that bandwidth is the mechanism connecting these two shocks - losing your home and losing your job - in a way that reaffirms how eviction is a cause, not just a condition, ofpoverty.

The uncertainty comes out a lot when you go out with the sheriffs and the eviction movers who remove people from their homes. One thing you'll see, and this is an observation that's made briefly in the book, is just how surprised so many people are. You wake a lot of people up when you're with the sheriff. You go into a lot of homes where nothing's packed - the dishes have been washed from the night before. It's startling, and I think part of that is a communications breakdown - some of that breakdown in communication might be intentional on the part of the landlords, and some of it might notbe.

But then there's this other, maybe deeper reason, which is something like denial - something like an inability to really come face to face with the fact that people will soon knock on your door and push you and your things out in thestreet.
There's one scene from your ride-alongs with the sheriffs and movers that captures that in a really heartbreakingway:
As the move went on, the woman slowed down. At first, she had borne down on the emergency with focus and energy, almost running through the house with one hand grabbing something and the other holding up the phone. Now she was wandering through the halls aimlessly, almost drunkenly. Her face had that look. The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours. It was something like denial giving way to the surrealism of the scene: the speed and violence of it all: sheriffs leaning against your wall, hands resting on holsters; all these strangers, these sweating men, piling your things outside, drinking water from your sink poured into your cups, using your bathroom. It was the look of being undone by a wave of questions. What do I need for tonight, for this week? Who should I call? Where is the medication? Where will we go? It was the face of a mother who climbs out of the cellar to find the tornado has leveled thehouse.

She asked for a few more days, they said no, so she's just running around frantically. Imagine that you had to move immediately. Now. You gotta get your kids' stuff, you gotta get the medication, you gotta figure out what should be left behind and what should be kept - it's just this overwhelming amount of information pouring over tenants in this very hard moment. But then there are the moments that follow that are equally taxing from a cognitive standpoint: applying for housing and facing rejection after rejection after rejection. And that wears on you - that wears on your spirit. Not just because it's all this time, but because getting rejected really sucks, and it can wear youdown.

There's a heartbreaking scene where one of the white trailer-park residents blows her entire monthly food-stamp allowance on "two lobster tails, shrimp, king crab legs, salad, and lemon meringue pie." She wolfs down this meal that ends up setting her back in the months that follow.
I think it's important to remind you and perhaps everyone that this happened once. Larraine did have what some people would call a spending problem, and when that happened, with the lobster on food stamps, I was really... [ laughs] angry at her! And kind of was, like, completely at a loss. But I've always thought it was not my job to apologize for people's decisions but to try to understand them, and try to make people understandthem.

And this is a point where the book draws directly from Scarcity, and I came down on the side of "Larraine's not poor because she did that - she did that because she's poor." It makes a lot of sense, I think, when you just consider how much more it would take to bring Larraine up from her state of massive insecurity to something that's just like, you know, stable poverty. Because that gap is so vast, Larraine doesn't have any incentive to scrimp and save, to put a little money away. Would that be wise for her to do so or prudent? Sure, but isn't it also prudent to give her some joy and to recognize that she refuses to be reduced to her economic situation itself? And so I think that this is a case where it's not bad behavior that's causing poverty; it's the other way around. Did Larraine pay a cost for that? Absolutely. She took it on the chin after that - she went hungry, she went to food pantries. But she didn't apologize for doing that, and I don't feel like I shouldeither.

One of the interesting things you explained in the book, though, is that this idea of hating the poor has set in among the poor. In the trailer park, where seemingly half the residents faced the threat of eviction at some point, eviction was "understood to be the outcome of individual failure." You write that "No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves." How did that worldview develop? Is it an oversimplification to call it a particularly American thing?
There is research beyond my book in social science that does show that people in other countries understand inequality with different kinds of tools and different kinds of explanations than we do in America. My friend who lives in Paris says that if you see a homeless person in Paris, you say, "Where is the state here? What has the state done?" If you see a homeless person here you say, "What has this person done?" So you might be onto somethingthere.

In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves. And I think there's a reason for that - this is what I saw in my work, anyways. When you're trying to make ends meet and get your lights on, get food on your table, find resources that you need, you're often relying on folks all around you, you're reaching out to people for help. But in reaching out you also see people's stuff - you see their troubles, you're exposed to their traumas. You're introduced to their hardships in a way. A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential, its ability to work together to change the community and change theirlives.

The degree to which residents think their neighbors have suffered significant traumas like eviction, incarceration, or having their kids removed by Child Protective Services doesn't provide a good measure of the actual rates of those things. But this degree of perceived suffering is negatively correlated with political capacity, or the degree to which residents believe they and their neighbors can work together to bring about something good and improve their community. So the more you see suffering around you, the less likely you are to perceive political capacity around you, and that's controlling for things like the actual poverty rate and crime rate in aneighborhood.

I'm wondering if it's a stretch to call this a version of collective learned helplessness - it's like, Oh, my neighbors are so battered and traumatized that what's the point? We're not going to be able to fix this.
I think that's right, and then that's compounded by the beginning part of our conversation, which was just the massive cognitive load it takes just to survive poverty, just to keep housing. And that coupled with this other thing helps us understand why communities like College Mobile Home Park in Milwaukee [one of the sites of Desmond's field research] are fairly tolerant of the inequality between their condition and theirlandlord's.

Their vision is focused on more immediate problems, right? Their vision is focused on Can I get my hot water fixed? My bathtub is sinking through the floorboards - can we please fix this? I'm behind on rent - can I have a break? Will you let me slide? I think these are the problems which confront folks so much on a day-to-day basis that looking at a longer time horizon like, Can we work together to improve the community? Can we shore up our rights in this place? It almost seems silly when faced with those more immediateproblems.

In a footnote, you talk about how we shouldn't see folks in the low-end-housing market as "rational actors" making careful, informed decisions, as per the predictions of classical economic theory about how people behave. Rather, they're "exhausted settlers." Could you expand on what you mean by that?
When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up? But when you're someone like Arleen, a desperate young mother who calls 40, 50, 60, 70 people just looking for a place, you might start off picking neighborhoods, you might start off with a lot of opinions about the kinds of house you want to live in, but in the end you just get exhausted, it just wears on you, and so you see in Arleen's story where in the end she's just like, A house is a house - whatever. I'll takewhatever.

And where she ends up is not in any way a reflection of her actual preferences. When someone finally approves her to live somewhere, she just goes for it and is able to stay there until the next eviction. And Arleen's experience, I think, reflects the experiences of many low-income families who have been cast into the private rental market and are in really desperate situations. Now, I don't think anyone would disagree with that, but it's interesting to put those experiences up against survey data, for example, asking people, Why do you think your city's so segregated? And most people in Milwaukee, at least, say that it's because of personal preference. Or putting that story about exhausted housing searches and settling for whatever you get, putting that up against ideas of why people select in and out of neighborhoods and gentrification and these kinds of things, I think really complicates the story and shows that a lot of poor families didn't select into a neighborhood because they wanted to or because of the school district or anything like that, but just because that was their only option at thetime.

Arleen would do this heartbreaking thing where, battered with shame over not being able to provide her kids with food or shoes or whatever else, she flipped things around: She'd tell her kids, You don't deserve that, or, You're not really hungry. You're not worthy of my assistance, in other words.
I have kids. It's hard to say no, but imagine you have to say no to things like food and say no to things like a home and a warm bed. And people like Arleen grow a protective mechanism when they're faced with those terrible situations, which is to sometimes subtly, sometimes not, not say, "No, I can't," but rather say, "No I won't," or, "No, you don't deserve it, "or, "No, you're getting too fat." I think that this is a clear example of how this problem, a lack of affordable housing, and this problem of the level of poverty we've allowed in our cities, is leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation. And from a cognitive standpoint, I think it's something that you see - you don't just see it in these situations, you can see it in situations of other kinds of trauma where people do use these kinds of self-protective mechanisms to get through it, to make sense of it, to not be consumed byshame.

I think this comes out a lot in Crystal's story. We see Crystal [a young woman who allows Arleen and her kids to live with her at one point] at turns being generous and loving, and then also full of rage sometimes, and sometimes violent. And there are psychological reasons for that, you know - Crystal allowed me to see her psych report, and the trauma she experienced as a child left an imprint on her body and mind. So how should we explain Crystal's behavior, right? Should we say it's a reflection of, like, "the culture of the streets," or something like that? I think that wouldn't fully address the complexities that matter; I think we do need to understand how things that sometimes look like culture are often deeply informed by trauma orcoping.

If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma. And we're able to accept trauma with certain groups, like with soldiers, for instance - we understand that they face trauma and that trauma can be connected to things like depression or acts of violence later on in life. I think that we would benefit a lot from a similar kind of mind-set when it comes to povertysometimes.

Your book is going to draw comparisons to Alice Goffman's On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, since both books involve a white ethnographer "embedding" with poor black people, though in your book about half of your subjects were white. I'm curious if, when you saw that book's reception and some of the controversies that popped up around it, that had any effect on you and your work on Evicted.
I think one of the things we've learned from the reception of that book is how deeply people care about our methods, you know, and our claims, and how we know what we know. The truth is absolutely paramount, it's so paramount, and we have to be dogged about it and transparent and accountable to those claims. And I think that's something that's come out from the conversation around thatbook.

I was doing fieldwork long before that book was published, so it didn't affect the work in and of itself. I think that one thing is that I had always thought about hiring a fact-checker for this book, and I did in the end. I think I probably would have done that regardless, but I think that the reception of that book influenced that decision,too.

You and Goffman have pretty different views of the fact-checking process. I interviewed her, and she said that if one of her subjects said, "I went to court facing this charge," that would go in the book, and she thought her subjects' understanding of their situation mattered a great deal, regardless - to a certain extent, at least - of whether it matched up with the legal reality. So some of the differences between how your book and hers approached fact-checking are a bit philosophical. But it is a resource thing, too, right? It took you a lot of money, and money in the form of time, to fact-check everything in Evicted.
It takes a lot of time. It takes an enormous amount oftime.

So you don't think there are ethical problems with sharing fieldnotes with another scholar just so they can help you fact-check, right? Because part of the debate here has been about the boundaries of ethical concerns and where they lie.
So in my experience, what I did is the fact-checker signed a nondisclosure agreement, because she was going to be interacting with some sensitive material and people's real names and that kind of stuff, and then I handed everything over to her. I don't think that's an ethical issue. For the New Yorker excerpt, the New Yorker fact-checker interviewed Arleen and Sherrena [a landlord and entrepreneur] and other people that were in that excerpt. I called everyone and just said, "Hey, would you guys be okay with talking to a fact-checker?And they said sure. The fact-checker I hired for my book ended up conducting over 30 independent interviews with folks who were in the book and other sources to corroborate stuff. So, I dunno - I feel like those are pretty established practices injournalism.

There are some corners of academia where the concept of subjectivity is a pretty big area of focus, and you're supposed to spend a lot of time reflecting on how your personal identity and biases and so on affected your observations and storytelling. In the last section of your book, you note, in effect, I'm a white guy - this closed some doors, this opened other doors, but you don't really dwell on it. And you didn't tell the story from a first-person perspective, which as you note has in recent years become "almost exclusively" the way ethnography is done. How'd you decide on your approach?
I wanted to have a conversation about this massive, morally urgent problem that's confronting our country today. I wanted to have a conversation about the fact that there are mothers like Arleen who have to choose between feeding her kids and paying the rent; that there are mothers like Vanetta who take extremely desperate measures, like committing an armed robbery, to try and keep her kids. And I thought that was the conversation I wanted to have, that was the book I wanted to write, and I felt that to write that it was important for me to really prioritize Vanetta and Arleen and other people in the book, to get at that conversation. So I guess that was the goal that drove thosedecisions.
This interview has been condensed andedited.

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What Happens to People Who Get Evicted Over and Over and Over

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The very first thing that happens in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City , a book released earlier this week by Crown Publishers, is a young boy named Jori throws a snowball at a car. The occupant stops, gets out, chases the boy and his cousin back to Jori's apartment, breaks down the door, and leaves.

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EVICTED by Matthew Desmond | Book Trailer

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Tenants rights for the state of Wisconsin which is where the novel is based, would of been very useful for the characters in the book to have known their rights before they became evicted.

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The Tenant Resource Center offers free information to tenants, landlords and service providers interested in learning more about their rental rights and responsibilities.
Funding for this FREE service ends in March.
However, with your help, we can continue serving Wisconsin residents. Please consider making a one time donation, or a small monthly donation to help keep our services free!

For the fastest help on common housing issues, please browse the links below:
If you can't get your questions answered from our online resources, please contact us: Walk-In:

No appointment necessary

1202 Williamson Street, Suite 102, Madison, WI 53703
Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM

333 East Campus Mall, 3rd Floor, Cubby 1, Madison, WI 53703

Phone:

Housing Questions (Madison): (608) 257-0006 x 3

Housing Questions (Dane County, outside Madison): (608) 257-0006 x 4

Housing Questions (Toll-Free, outside of Dane County): (877) 238-RENT (7368)

UW-Madison Office: (608) 216-2321

En Español: (608) 257-0006 x 1

Lus Hmoob: (608) 257-0006 x 2

Email:

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The Tenant Resource Center offers free information to tenants, landlords and service providers interested in learning more about their rental rights and responsibilities. Funding for this FREE service ends in March. However, with your help, we can continue serving Wisconsin residents. Please consider making a one time donation, or a small monthly donation to help keep our services free!

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The official Evicted novel website, has photography from the book, background information, and an excerpt from the book.

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The official website of Matthew Desmond, author of EVICTED: POVERTY AND PROFIT IN THE AMERICAN CITY. Matthew is also the John L. Loeb Associate Professor ...

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A family in Milwaukee packing their items before the storage truck comes because of their eviction notice.

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Discusses the reasons behind why people become evicted, reviews the book as well.

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Seeking distraction one winter afternoon, a Milwaukee boy takes to some old-fashioned mischief and hurls snowballs at passing cars. A driver gives chase and kicks in the door of the house where the boy lives with his mother and younger brother. The landlord puts the family out. Thus begins an odyssey that in Matthew Desmond's gripping and important book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, exposes the harrowing world of the ten million or so low-income households that pay half or more of their income for rent and utilities, a long-overlooked population whose numbers have recently soared.

The mother, Arleen, finds a house she likes, and it consumes only 84 percent of her cash income. But the city condemns it. So she moves the teen, Jori, and his brother, Jafiris, to a place she calls "Crack Head City" and then to a duplex where the rent, $550 a month, requires 88 percent of her income. She falls behind and gets evicted two days before Christmas, but the new tenant lets her stay until she finds a place. Living with a stranger causes friction, and Arleen calls ninety landlords before finding a place, from which she is again evicted. The situation worsens. She and the boys double up with a neighbor who is turning tricks. They rent a place where they are robbed at gunpoint. When Arleen's next apartment takes 96 percent of her welfare check, she can't keep the lights on. Her worst fear comes to pass: child welfare takes the kids.

Evicted tells this and other disturbing stories in spellbinding detail in service of two main points. One is that growing numbers of low-income households pay crushing shares of their incomes for shelter-50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent, and more-leaving inadequate sums for items as basic as medicine and food. Their numbers were rising for decades but soared to record levels during the Great Recession. The book's second point is that the evictions aren't just a consequence of poverty but also a cause. Evictions make kids change schools and cost adults their jobs. They undermine neighborhoods, force desperate families into worse housing, and leave lasting emotional scars. Yet they have been an afterthought, if that, in discussions of poverty.

Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, cites plenty of statistics but it's his ethnographic gift that lends the work such force. He's one of a rare academic breed: a poverty expert who engages with the poor. His portraits are vivid and unsettling. Crystal, who takes in Arleen, had parents on crack and got passed around to two dozen foster homes. She ends up homeless and prostituting herself, but never misses church. Pam has "a midwestern twang and a face cut from a high school yearbook photo." But she is so desperate for housing that she tolerates a racist boyfriend who makes her biracial daughters chant "White power!" It's not easy to show desperate people using drugs or selling sex and still convey their courage and dignity. Evicted pulls it off.

It is odd that the shortage of low-income housing gets little attention, even among experts on the left. Decent affordable shelter is a primal human need, and its disappearance is one of the most troubling results of growing inequality. Housing patterns shape more visible issues like schools, jobs, and crime. What's more, the affordability crisis, though worst at the bottom, is creeping well into the lower middle class. Perhaps the democratizing of shelter poverty will broaden public concern.

A major point to keep in mind is that the US spends huge sums to subsidize housing for people who are well-off (through the mortgage interest deduction and other tax breaks) while most poor renters get nothing: only one of four low-income households that qualify for assistance gets it. Desmond's solution-give all eligible households a voucher, creating a right to housing-has little active support, even from liberals. But a major study released last summer showed that vouchers, under the right circumstances, can dramatically improve children's prospects of breaking out of poverty. Evicted doesn't cinch the case for a universal voucher; it does capture the perversity of the status quo and invite alternate proposals.

2.

Desmond launched his research in 2008, as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, when he moved into a trailer park on Milwaukee's south side, looking for people with eviction notices. The park was in the news because an alderman, incensed at crime and code violations, was threatening to have it closed. Raw sewage bubbled up beneath some of the trailers, and Desmond rarely had hot water despite identifying himself as a writer studying the park's condition. The landlord, Tobin Charney, "a hard man with squinting eyes," won a reprieve in part by having sympathetic tenants tell TV crews that closing the park would leave them homeless. Then he evicted some of them.

Desmond, who is white, moved across the residentially segregated city to the black ghetto on the near north side. His landlord, Sherrena Tarver (all the names are pseudonyms), was a hard-charging woman who once taught fourth grade. She was eager to show him "what landlords had to go through" and complained about "these low-quality people." Desmond tracked eight families from both sides of town, and conducted two surveys, of 1,100 Milwaukee tenants and 250 people summoned to housing court. With visits to landlord meetings and rides with eviction crews, the book captures what could be called the Eviction Industrial Complex.

Part of the message is that evictions are much more common than previously thought. Desmond's survey found that more than one in eight Milwaukee renters faced a forced move in the course of three years. That includes all involuntary moves, such as those resulting from building condemnations, and is roughly three times the comparable estimate found in census data. Desmond says that the official data undercount the large volume of informal evictions that occur outside of court.

The numbers sound extraordinary but not in light of the shelter burdens that low-income households carry. The government says that rent and utilities are affordable if they consume no more than 30 percent of a household's income. Analyzing census data, Desmond finds that the majority of poor households pay over 50 percent of their income for shelter and more than a quarter pay over 70 percent. Among the tenants in housing court, a third spend at least 80 percent. Evicted 's families double up with strangers, sell food stamps, and pirate electricity but inevitably fall behind.

Evictions are brutal. Desmond watches as an armed deputy knocks and a mother pleads vainly for time. The mover says she can pay to store her possessions or have them left on the street. She can't afford storage. "Curbside service, baby!" the mover tells the crew. Three children watch their mother pace. "Her face had that look," Desmond writes. "The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours." One woman from the trailer park spent $1,000 on the storage bills but fell behind and lost her belongings anyway. About 70 percent of evicted tenants who opt for storage do. A week earlier, a man asked the deputy for a private moment, then shot himself in the head.

Evictions destabilize neighborhoods. The more people come and go, the less chance there is for cohesion. A case in point is the Hinkston family-Doreen, four kids, and three grandkids-who were neighborhood fixtures on a block where they lived for seven years. Doreen was a porch sitter who knew everyone and kept her eyes on the street. When an eviction notice forced them to move in a hurry, they quickly settled for a run-down house on a block where they knew no one and kept inside. "With Doreen's eviction, Thirty-Second Street lost a steadying presence," Desmond writes, "but Wright Street didn't gain one." Evictions often generate two moves-a rush that often ends in a hellhole and an effort to climb out of it.

Worse, evictions destabilize people. Jori, the snowball thrower, went to five different schools in seventh and eighth grades, "when he went at all." He once missed seventeen consecutive days. The disruptions cause workers to get fired. Letters sent to wrong addresses cause people to miss appointments and lose public aid. Evictions mar the tenants' records, making it harder to get housing assistance or rent private apartments. The effects are enduring, as measured by incidents like hunger or lost utilities. "The year after eviction, families experience 20 percent higher levels of material hardships than similar families who were not evicted," Desmond writes. He continues:

Then there is the toll eviction takes on a person's spirit.... One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rates of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers.

Eviction isn't just another hardship, Desmond argues, but a detour onto a much harder path-"a cause, not just a condition, of poverty."

The landlords in Evicted hold all the cards. Technically, they can't retaliate against tenants who complain of stopped-up toilets or broken windows. But they can evict anyone who fails to pay the rent, regardless of the housing conditions. The result is a kind of devil's pact. "Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted," Desmond writes. When cases go to court, tenants rarely win. About 70 percent of them don't even appear. They can't miss work or find child care or stomach the humiliation. The sound of eviction court is the call of a name, "a pause, and three loud thumps of the stamp."

When one of Sherrena Tarver's houses catches fire, a baby dies. There were supposed to be smoke detectors in the bedroom, but the firemen didn't hear them. Sherrena fears she's at risk. "I thought we had put some smoke detectors up there," she says. "I can't remember right now." The baby's mother, Kamala, is one of her former students. When the fire inspector calls the next day and tells Sherrena she's off the hook, she has one question: Does she have to return Kamala's rent?

The answer is no. And she doesn't.

3.

The struggle to pay the rent may sound like a problem the poor have always faced. It's not. Into the 1970s, low-income housing, though often squalid, generally didn't squeeze budgets. The wind whipped through the tar-paper shacks, but the shacks were abundant and cheap. Demolition and gentrification claimed the cheap units, and sputtering incomes swelled the number of needy renters. In 1970, the US had nearly a million more affordable units than poor households, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Two decades later, the situation had reversed: there were five million more poor households than affordable units. Housing was better but cost a lot more.

The severe recession that began in December 2007 delivered a double whammy. Foreclosures turned millions of homeowners into renters, which kept rents rising even as incomes fell. Between 2001 and 2014, real rents rose 7 percent, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, while renters' incomes fell 9 percent. As a result, the number of households paying more than 30 percent of their income for shelter rose to a record 21.3 million-about one in six nationwide. And the number paying more than half their income rose even faster, to 11.4 million, from 7.5 million. Among them, 30 percent had a full-time worker.

For the poorest families, the chances of finding affordable shelter are virtually nil. But the squeeze is on higher up. Even among households earning between $30,000 and $45,000 a year-clerks, cooks, or low-level medical technicians, for example-nearly half pay more than the 30 percent the government says they can afford. Of them, 10 percent devote at least half their income to shelter. This may seem like a problem mostly confined to big cities. But places with cheaper housing generally pay lower wages, which offsets the benefits. High-cost New York City and low-cost McAllen, Texas, are two places the Harvard center identifies as especially hard to afford. To pay for what the federal government says a modest two-bedroom apartment should cost in a mid-priced state like Florida, a full-time worker has to earn $19.47 an hour. As the National Low Income Housing Coalition notes, that's more than twice the minimum wage.

Belts can tighten only so far. A household with an income of $15,000 that pays 70 percent for shelter has about $12.50 a day left over for everything else-food, health care, clothing, furniture, transportation, and the like. Even if you assume that poor people underreport their income, as they generally do, something's got to give. Often it's food, since unlike rent, meals can be skipped without the sheriff being summoned. The Harvard center found that low-income households with severe rent burdens spent 38 percent less on food than similar households with affordable shelter, 55 percent less on health care, and 60 percent less on transportation.

Why are rents so high? Desmond points to exploitative landlords and their ability to "charge as much as they want." But owners don't charge what they want. They charge what the market will bear. The big problem is that it costs more to build even modest housing than millions of households can pay, whether the builder is greedy or not. That's partly because restrictive zoning and overzealous building codes drive up the price. But it's mostly because of the inherent cost of the basics: land, interest, materials, utilities. As a rule of thumb nationwide, even an efficient nonprofit developer can't build an apartment affordable to a household making less than about $32,000 a year. That leaves out nearly a third of American households.

Housing aid helps fill the gap. If tenants are lucky enough to receive it, they pay 30 percent of their income for shelter, and the government pays the rest up to a modest local cap. But only a quarter of the households that are poor enough to qualify get it. The rest face long waits and many never get help. Desmond would expand the program so that everyone who qualifies gets it-making housing aid an entitlement instead of a lottery.

Leave aside the question of what this would cost. A more interesting question is how much would the needy benefit and in what way: would affordable housing simply make life more humane or would it lead to more upward mobility? Desmond argues the latter. "A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country," he writes.

Evictions would plummet and become rare occurrences. Homelessness would almost disappear. Families would immediately feel the income gains and be able to buy enough food, invest in themselves and their children through schooling or job training, and start modest savings.

Unfortunately, there's room for doubt about this mobility thesis, even in the stories Desmond tells. Rent burdens compound his characters' problems, but the issues run much deeper. A number are addicted to drugs. Others are mentally or physically impaired. Many failed to finish high school. One got pregnant at fourteen. It's reasonable to hope that helping adults get a place to stay will at least help their children advance, but the evidence is thin.

A study last year by Brian A. Jacob of the University of Michigan, Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago, and Max Kapustin examined precisely that question. In 1997, the Chicago Housing Authority held a lottery; 18,000 households got vouchers and tens of thousands of virtually identical households did not. The study found that vouchers "had little if any impact on the education, crime, or health outcomes" of children. (Vouchers also reduced the amount their parents worked.) That still leaves a case for vouchers, but it's a simpler case than promoting upward mobility: poor adults and their children should suffer less. There's a floor beneath which no one should fall. A safety net that lets three quarters of the needy slip through simply isn't a safety net.

At the same time, we may not yet know how much vouchers can achieve. Evicted seems to have been completed before a major study last August bolstered the case for improved mobility. It involved Moving to Opportunity, a famous housing experiment from the 1990s, which gave vouchers to several thousand families on the condition that they use them to move from high-poverty neighborhoods to areas less poor, presumably with more jobs and better schools. Hopes ran high, but for years the results were disappointing. The adults' mental health and safety improved, but their earnings and employment didn't, and their children fared no better in school. The teenage boys who moved had more delinquency problems than those who stayed behind.

The new study (by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence F. Katz, all of Harvard) examined the long-term outcomes for younger kids, who had more time to benefit from the new neighborhood. On average, they were eight when they moved. By their twenties, they earned about a third more than those who stayed behind, and they were a third more likely to attend college. Over their lifetime, they stood to earn an additional $300,000. The girls' chances of becoming single mothers fell by 26 percent.

These are huge gains by the standards of experimental programs-the social policy equivalent of a moonshot. The researchers don't know why, especially since in the medium term the kids did no better in school. One theory for the gains generally is that better neighborhoods offer more second chances. But the crucial change was getting away from very poor neighborhoods.

If the results can be replicated, the issue becomes scale. It's not clear how many poor people are willing to move to an unfamiliar place-about half of those offered the vouchers didn't go-or how the new areas would react. In Baltimore, one of the five Moving to Opportunity sites, even a small-scale effort ignited a huge backlash. The potential for demagoguery is great, especially in a demagogic age. Then again, suburbs are more diverse now. Katz argues that the requisite amount of income-mixing would take America back to the patterns of the 1970s, a significant change but not wild-eyed social engineering. Even getting halfway there might dramatically improve millions of lives.

4.

Poor people can be remarkably generous. The evicted in Evicted turn to half-strangers, and the strangers take them in. A neighbor houses Pam in the trailer park; Crystal shelters Arleen in the ghetto. When Crystal and a friend spy a boy eating table scraps at McDonald's they pool coins to buy him a meal, even though they are homeless themselves.

In the 1970s, the anthropologist Carol Stack famously described the inner city as a giant favor bank. Poor women formed networks of real and fictive kin and dispensed aid-cigarettes, babysitting, a spare room-knowing they could later claim help in return. They formed their own safety net. Desmond argues that deepening destitution has made those networks harder to sustain. With family less willing or able to help, the destitute turn to strangers and a succession of "disposable ties." They turn to each other and on each other.

When Arleen gets evicted before Christmas, she doesn't even ask her siblings for help. They are too poor. An aunt could step in, but Arleen is saving that call for a worse emergency. So when the new tenant offers to let Arleen stay, Arleen hugs her and accepts before learning her name. Crystal has motives for keeping Arleen around. She needs furniture, and having just aged out of foster care she wants a mother figure.

Instant intimacy yields to screaming matches. During their first fight-after Arleen's son Jori calls Crystal a "bitch"-Crystal, who speaks in tongues, says that the Holy Ghost has told her to relent and not put the family out. During the second fight Arleen comes unglued and resists Crystal's efforts to calm her.

"You don't know what it's like to have your father molest you and your mother not care about it!" Arleen screams.

"Yes I do!" Crystal says. "I know exactly what that's like 'cause my stepfather molested me when I was just a little girl, and that's why they sent me to the foster care.... You've been molested? I've been molested too."

The exchange ends with another hug, which becomes a prelude to another fight. When Arleen finally leaves, she tells Jori to grab the cheap adapter she bought for the gas line. This would disable the stove. Crystal becomes furious, and they go from confidantes to combatants with startling ferocity. "Stankin' ass bitch!" Arleen screams. Crystal throws their stuff all over the yard, Jori smashes Crystal's TV, and his little brother hits her with a shower rod. Crystal takes up with other strangers and the pattern repeats: "Make a friend, use a friend, lose a friend," often violently.

Evicted doesn't dwell on it, but the talk of molestation is revealing. No fewer than four characters disclose that they were victims of childhood sexual abuse. The issue doesn't get much attention in discussions of chronic poverty. But in my own interviews with women on welfare, I've found that they mention it with dismaying frequency. Women who were raped or molested as children are more likely to suffer from depression, drug addiction, or domestic violence-all of which interfere with education and employment and drive up poverty rates. It is to Desmond's credit that he highlights the trauma; it also shows that the problems he's conveying go well beyond housing costs.

The children in Evicted have hellish lives. "Tell us about the time that Dad hit you with a bottle and blood was coming out of your head," a six-year-old girl asks her mother. Even at four, one of the chronically homeless boys seems "finished with childhood." He refuses to hold his mother's hand or sing in preschool. When she faces possible jail time for committing armed robbery, she brings him to court with orders to be stoic "if they give Momma the punishment." The mother cries over her fifteen-month sentence, but the boy "stared back stone-faced, strong, just like his momma had taught him."

Desmond notes only in passing that Milwaukee, the city he concentrates on, has been widely celebrated for "ending welfare"-slashing the rolls with time limits and work requirements-a strategy that some officials would apply to the rest of the safety net. That he finds so much misery suggests the verdict of success needs revisiting.

One especially haunting moment involves Jori, Arleen's fourteen-year-old, who is less a child than his mother's would-be protector. "If Arleen needed to smile, Jori would steal for her," Desmond writes. "If she was disrespected, he would fight for her." But he can't protect her, and she can't protect him, which leaves them bottled up with anger. The one source of innocence in Jori's life is a kitten, named Little, who pounces on shoelaces and slurps ramen noodles and makes him laugh. When Jori is evicted, he entrusts the kitten to a neighbor and returns to find him crushed by a car. There happens to be a mannequin lying around, and Jori kneels over it. "He hit the face with a closed fist. He kept hitting it. Soon he was grunting, and his punches flew faster and harder and louder." Arlene, shaken, screams at him to stop.

In an afterword, Desmond explains that his own family lost his childhood home to foreclosure about the time he left for college. He says that researching the book "left me depressed for years." But Evicted isn't a depressing book. It is also a stirring reminder that the US accepts as ordinary a depth of poverty that is extraordinary and cruel. At its heart is a simple message: "No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become."

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Matthew Desmond's gripping and important book Evicted tells disturbing stories in spellbinding detail in service of two main points. One is that growing numbers of low-income households pay crushing shares of their incomes for shelter, leaving inadequate sums for items as basic as medicine and food.

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An article about the so called 'eviction epidemic'. Has stories from various characters featured in the novel like Sherrena and Arleen.

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Arleen Beale's latest eviction began with a snowball fight. It was January of 2008, and Milwaukee was experiencing its snowiest winter on record. Arleen's son Jori and his cousin were cutting up, packing powder tight and taking aim at the passing cars on Arthur Avenue. One jerked to a stop, and a man jumped out, chasing the boys to Arleen's apartment, where he broke down the door with a few kicks. When the landlord found out about the property damage, she decided to evict. Arleen had been there with her sons-Jori was thirteen, Jafaris five-for eight months.

The day they had to be out was bitterly cold, but Arleen knew what would happen if she waited any longer to leave. Her first eviction had taken place sixteen years earlier, when she was twenty-two; she figured that she had rented twenty houses since turning eighteen. First, the landlord would summon the sheriff, who would arrive with a gun, a team of movers, and a judge's order saying that her house was no longer hers. Then Arleen would be given two options: "truck" or "curb." "Truck" meant that her things would be loaded into an eighteen-footer and checked into bonded storage. She could get everything back after paying three hundred and fifty dollars. Arleen didn't have the money, so she would have opted for "curb," which meant that the movers would pile everything onto the sidewalk: mattresses; a floor-model television; her copy of "Don't Be Afraid to Discipline"; a nice glass dining table and a lace tablecloth; the meat in the freezer.

Arleen was thirty-eight, with pecan-brown skin and world-weary eyes. She had supported her children over the years by working, as well as by relying on welfare. When Jori's father left her, she had a cleaning job at Mainstay Suites, by the airport. In despair, she quit and began receiving welfare. Later, she found work wiping tables and mopping up spills at the Third Street Pier restaurant, but, after her mother died, she left that job, too.

When Arleen was evicted from her apartment on Arthur Avenue, she was receiving a stipend from Wisconsin Works, a family-aid program-a reduced amount, because she wasn't working. The sum, in 2008, was the same as when welfare was reformed more than a decade earlier: $20.65 a day, $7,536 a year.

Arleen took her sons to a homeless shelter, where they stayed until April, when she found a house on Nineteenth and Hampton, in the predominantly black inner city, on Milwaukee's North Side, where she'd grown up. There was often no running water, and Jori had to bucket out what was in the toilet. But Arleen loved that the rent was only five hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, and that the house was set apart from others on the block. "It was quiet," she remembered. "It was my favorite place."

After a few weeks, the city found the house "unfit for human habitation." Arleen moved into a drab apartment complex deeper in the inner city, on Atkinson Avenue, which she soon learned was a haven for drug dealers. She feared for her boys, especially Jori, who was goofy and slack-shouldered and would talk to anyone. They endured four summer months there before their caseworker at Wraparound, a social-services agency, found them a bottom duplex unit on Thirteenth Street and Keefe.

To avoid embarrassment, Arleen and the boys walked their things over to the new place at night, pushing the larger items, like the sun-faded floral-print love seat, on top of a wheeled garbage can. At the house, she held her breath and tried the lights, smiling with relief when they came on. She could live off someone else's electricity bill for a while. There was a fist-size hole in a living-room window, the front door had to be locked with an ugly wooden plank dropped into metal brackets, and the carpet was filthy, the dirt ground in. But the kitchen was spacious and the living room well lit. Arleen stuffed a piece of clothing into the window hole and hung ivory curtains.

The rent was five hundred and fifty dollars a month, utilities not included-the going rate for a two-bedroom apartment in one of the worst neighborhoods in America's fourth-poorest city-and would take eighty-eight per cent of Arleen's six-hundred-and-twenty-eight-dollar-a-month welfare check. Maybe she could make it work, at least through the winter.

There was a knock at the door. It was the landlord, Sherrena Tarver, a short black woman with bobbed hair and freshly done nails, loaded down with groceries. (Names have been changed.) She had spent forty dollars of her own money on the food and picked up the rest at a pantry. She knew Arleen needed it. Arleen thanked Sherrena and closed the door. Things were off to a good start.

Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare enough to draw crowds. Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today. In February, 1932, the Times published an account of community resistance to the eviction of three families in the Bronx, observing, "Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000."

These days, evictions are too commonplace to attract attention. There are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. Some moving companies specialize in evictions, their crews working all day long, five days a week. Hundreds of data-mining companies sell landlords tenant-screening reports that list past evictions and court filings. Meanwhile, families have watched their incomes stagnate or fall as their housing costs have soared. Today, the majority of poor renting families spend more than half their income on housing, and millions of Americans are evicted every year. In Milwaukee, a city of fewer than a hundred and five thousand renter households, landlords legally evict roughly sixteen thousand adults and children each year. As the real-estate market has recovered in the wake of the foreclosure crisis and the ensuing recession, evictions have only increased.

But there are other ways, cheaper and quicker than a court order, to remove a family. Some landlords pay tenants a couple of hundred dollars to leave by the end of the week. Some take off the front door. Nearly half of the forced moves of renting families in Milwaukee are "informal evictions," which, like many rentals, involve no paperwork, and take place in the shadow of the law. Between 2009 and 2011, more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were displaced involuntarily, whether by formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation. In 2013, nearly the same proportion of poor renting families nationwide was unable to pay all of their rent, and a similar number thought it was likely that they would be evicted soon.

For decades, social scientists, journalists, and policymakers have focussed on jobs, public assistance, parenting, and mass incarceration as the central problems faced by the American poor, overlooking just how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly everyone has a landlord.

A few months before Arleen moved into the Thirteenth Street duplex, Sherrena Tarver wound her way through the North Side, listening to R. & B. with her window down. Most middle-class Milwaukeeans zoomed past the inner city on the freeway. Landlords took the side streets, typically not in their Saab or Audi but in their "rent collector," some oil-leaking, rusted-out van or truck that hauled around extension cords, ladders, maybe a loaded pistol, plumbing snakes, toolboxes, a can of Mace, and other necessities. Sherrena usually left her lipstick-red Camaro at home and visited tenants in a beige-and-brown 1993 Chevy Suburban with twenty-two-inch rims, which belonged to Quentin, her husband, business partner, and property manager. He used a screwdriver to start it.

Some white Milwaukeeans still referred to the North Side as "the core," as they did in the sixties, and if they ventured into it they saw street after street of twenty-four-hour day-care centers, fading murals, and corner stores with " WIC Accepted Here" signs. Deindustrialization had crippled cities across the Rust Belt, and Milwaukee was among the hardest hit; by 2000, its population had fallen below six hundred thousand, down from more than seven hundred and forty thousand at its peak, in 1960. It showed. On a typical residential street on the North Side, a few single-family homes remained, owned by older folks who tended gardens and hung American flags. But most of the other dwellings were sagging duplexes or four-family apartment buildings with chipping paint and bedsheet curtains, next to vacant lots and empty houses with boarded-up doors and windows.

Sherrena saw all this, but she saw something else, too. Like other seasoned landlords, she knew who owned which multifamily house, which church, which bar; knew the neighborhood's vicissitudes of life, its shades and moods; knew which blocks were drug-soaked and which were quiet. She had a keen sense of the ghetto's value and how money could be made from a property that looked worthless to people who didn't know any better.

It wasn't easy. Once, an evicted couple shoved socks down the sinks and turned the water on full blast before moving out. A disgruntled mortgage customer tossed a homemade bomb through Sherrena's office window. The month before she met Arleen, someone had been shot in one of Sherrena's buildings. A few days after that, the city shut down one of her properties because a tenant had been caught stealing electricity. Sherrena remembered meeting the woman, who had said she was fleeing an abusive boyfriend. She had decided to rent to her and her children even though the woman had been evicted three times in the past two years. There's me having a heart again, she thought.

When people asked why she went into real estate, Sherrena talked about "long-term residuals" and "property being the best investment out there," but there was more to it. She shared something with other landlords: an unbending confidence that she could make it on her own without a company to fall back on, without a contract or a pension or a union. She had an understanding with the universe that she could start out with nothing and, through her own gumption and intelligence, come back with a good living.

Sherrena had bought a home in 1999, when prices were low. Riding the housing boom a few years later, she refinanced and pulled out twenty-one thousand dollars in equity, then refinanced again. She used the cash to buy her first rental property: a two-unit duplex in the inner city, where housing was cheapest. Rental profits, refinancing, and high-interest loans from private real-estate investors helped her buy more. She learned that the rental population comprised some upper- and middle-class households who rented out of preference or circumstance; some young and transient people; and most of the city's poor, who could not buy a home or gain access to public housing, because there wasn't enough of it. Landlords operated in different areas of the city, focussing on certain kinds of tenants: whites or immigrants, poor families or college students. Sherrena decided to specialize in renting to the black poor.

Four years after buying her first rental property, she owned thirty-six units, all in the inner city. She began carrying a pair of cell phones with backup batteries, reading Forbes, and accepting appointments from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. She also started a credit-repair business and an investment business. She bought two fifteen-passenger vans and launched a company that, for twenty-five to fifty dollars a seat, transported girlfriends, mothers, and children to visit their incarcerated loved ones upstate. Sherrena had found her calling: inner-city entrepreneur.

Arleen didn't mind Thirteenth Street. There was a bodega owned by Arabs on one end of her block and a bar frequented by old men on the other. She could walk Jafaris to school. She could have done without the crack addicts who'd recently moved into the abandoned house next door, but a little farther down the street a girl was learning to play the violin.

Arleen's house was built in the Greek Revival style: two stories of sandstone block with twin columns supporting an awning over the front door. A pair of picture windows, adorned with peaked pediments, faced the street from above the porch. But the house had deteriorated over the years. One column base was settling, causing the awning to slope sideways. The columns, the porch, and the window pediments had been painted ash gray, and an imposing iron-barred outer door had been installed.

But, inside, Arleen's new apartment was coming along. The previous tenants had been evicted and had vacated in a hurry, leaving behind a large armoire, a dresser, a bed, and a refrigerator. There was even more in the basement: dishes, clothes, an upholstered chair. Arleen put it all to use, rearranging the furniture and stacking the dishes next to her nice porcelain plates, which she'd been given long ago by a domestic-violence shelter. She unpacked a stereo and listened to old-school hip-hop tracks-her favorite being 2Pac's "Keep Ya Head Up"-while she worked on the apartment. In the kitchen, she hung a drawing of black farmers hoeing a row. In the basement, she'd come across rollers, brushes, and a five-gallon container of white paint. She lugged everything upstairs, tied a wrap around her head, and gave the walls a fresh coat.

Jafaris scavenged the basement, too, transforming mop handles, discarded tools, and dog leashes into tanks and helicopters locked in battle. He and his brother had grown used to churning through different apartments, neighborhoods, and schools. In the seventh and eighth grades, Jori had attended five schools; when the family was homeless he often skipped class to help Arleen look for a new place.

If Arleen had a housing voucher or a key to a public-housing unit, she would be spending only thirty per cent of her income on rent, which would mean the difference between stable poverty and grinding poverty, between planting roots in a community and being batted from one place to another. Two decades ago, when she was nineteen, she had rented a subsidized apartment for a hundred and thirty-seven dollars a month. She was grateful to be out of her mother's house, making decisions on her own. But, when a friend asked Arleen to give up her place and move in with her, she decided to say yes, walking away from the subsidized apartment and into the private rental market, where she had remained ever since. Once she left public housing, it was next to impossible to get back in. "I thought it was O.K. to move somewhere else," she recalled. "And I regret it, right now to this day. Young!" She shook her head at her nineteen-year-old self. "If I would've been in my right mind, I could have still been there."

The list of applicants for Milwaukee's rent-assistance program was notoriously stagnant. One day, Arleen stopped by the Housing Authority and asked about it. "The list is frozen," she was told. On it were more than thirty-five hundred families who had applied for assistance four years earlier and were still waiting for placement. It could have been worse. In larger cities, like Washington, D.C., the wait for public housing was counted in decades. Three in four American families who qualified for housing assistance received nothing: the amount of government aid didn't come close to meeting the need.

If Arleen wanted public housing, she would have to save roughly six hundred dollars to repay the Housing Authority for having left the subsidized apartment years before without giving notice; then wait two to three years until the list unfroze; then wait another two to five years until her application made it to the top of the pile; then pray that the person with the stale coffee and the heavy stamp reviewing her file would somehow overlook the eviction record that she'd accumulated while trying to make ends meet in the private housing market on a welfare check.

"Press 1 to leave a voice message." Sherrena pressed 1. "Arleen, this is Sherrena calling. I'm calling to find out if you had your rent. Remember we agreed that you were going to pay a little bit over to get caught up with the three-twenty you owed for-" Sherrena stopped herself from finishing the sentence with "your sister's funeral costs." She went on, "Um, I will be expecting the six hundred and fifty. Go 'head and give me a call."

Arleen didn't regret what she had done. Usually, when there was a funeral, she couldn't even afford to buy Jafaris new shoes and would just polish his best ones. But this was her sister-in the spiritual sense, if not the biological one. She would have been ashamed of herself if she hadn't pitched in. She split her welfare check between Sherrena and New Pitts Mortuary.

Sherrena felt bad when she heard about Arleen's sister. It was November, and Arleen had been living on Thirteenth Street for less than two months. She made her tenant a deal. Arleen could stay if she paid six hundred and fifty dollars for three months to make up the lost rent. Even if Arleen signed over her entire welfare check each month, she would still be short. But Sherrena was betting that Arleen could put in a few calls to family members or nonprofit agencies and ask for help.

Sherrena and Quentin were in the Suburban when Arleen called at the beginning of the next month. After a quick conversation, Sherrena hung up and looked at her husband. "Arleen said her check didn't come."

Quentin kept his eyes on the road. "Story of they life," he said.

Arleen had told a half-truth. She had received a check, but not for six hundred and twenty-eight dollars. She had missed an appointment with her welfare caseworker, having forgotten about it. A reminder notice was mailed to Atkinson-or was it Nineteenth Street? When Arleen didn't show up, the caseworker "sanctioned" her by decreasing her benefit. Arleen could have given Sherrena her reduced check, but she thought it was better to be behind and have a few hundred dollars in her pocket than be behind and completely broke.

Sherrena saw herself as a charitable businesswoman, providing housing to the destitute. "I don't discriminate against crackheads, because those crackheads need a place to stay," she'd say. Still, evictions were a regular part of her job. She didn't hesitate, but she also didn't reach mechanically for the pink papers. "It's kind of hard to put somebody out," she admitted. In September, Sherrena had learned that one of her favorite tenants-Lamar, a double amputee and a single father-had fallen behind. "I'm gonna have a hard time doing this," she told Quentin, when eviction began to seem necessary. "I love Lamar. But love don't pay the bills."

After thinking things over, Sherrena decided that the funeral and the subsequent welfare sanction had put Arleen too far behind: eight hundred and seventy dollars. It was time, she said, to "let go and move on to the next tenant." She filed the eviction paperwork and received a court date of December 23rd. It was the last eviction court before Christmas, and Sherrena knew the Milwaukee County Courthouse would be packed. The court used to take a break from evictions at Christmastime, but that was discontinued in 1991, after a landlord persuaded the American Civil Liberties Union to argue that the practice was an unfair religious celebration. Many parents chose to take their chances with their landlords rather than face their children empty-handed on Christmas morning. A new tenant had already asked Sherrena if a portion of her rent money could be returned so that she could buy gifts. "You gotta have a house to put the Christmas tree and presents in," Sherrena told her. "You've been knowing Christmas was coming eleven months ago."

Eviction proceedings took place in Room 400 of the Milwaukee County Small Claims Court, the busiest courtroom in the state. Sherrena scanned its long wooden pews for a seat, waving at landlords she recognized. At the back of the room, landlords were offering tenants stipulation agreements: they wouldn't be evicted if they caught up on the rent. Toward the front, where the bailiff sat, lawyers in pin-striped suits and power ties waited in a reserved space. They had been hired by landlords. Everyone in the reserved space was white.

Two clerks at a large wooden desk announced the day's cases and took attendance. Most of the names called went unanswered. Roughly seventy per cent of the tenants summoned to Milwaukee's eviction court didn't come. The same was true in other major cities. Some tenants couldn't miss work or couldn't find childcare or were confused by the whole process or couldn't care less or would rather avoid the humiliation. When a tenant didn't show up and her landlord or a representative did, the clerk applied three quick stamps to the file-indicating that the tenant had received a default eviction judgment-and placed it on top of a growing pile. The sound of eviction court was a soft hum of dozens of people sighing, coughing, murmuring, and whispering to children, interspersed with the cadence of a name, a pause, and three loud thumps of the stamp.

Sherrena wondered if Arleen would come. Most of her tenants didn't, and she preferred it that way. She had learned that it didn't matter how much kindness she had shown a tenant: "all that stuff goes out the window" during a hearing. Still, Sherrena had called Arleen that morning to remind her about court. She didn't have to, but she had a soft spot for Arleen.

The courtroom was full of black women, surrounded by children of all ages. In a typical month, three in four people in Milwaukee's eviction court were black, and three in four of those were women. One female renter in seventeen from the city's poorest black neighborhoods was evicted through the court system each year, twice the number for men from the same neighborhoods, and nine times that for women from the poorest white areas. Women from black neighborhoods made up less than ten per cent of Milwaukee's population but nearly a third of its evicted tenants. If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.

"Sherrena," someone whispered. Arleen had poked her head into Room 400.

Sherrena stepped into the hallway and walked up to Arleen, who was wearing a red hoodie. "Girl," Sherrena said, "I got to get you up outta this house or get my money. Genuine. . . . I mean, 'cause I got bills. I got a bill to show you right now that's gonna take your eyes outta your head." She reached into her files and handed Arleen a tax bill for a property of hers that the city had condemned. It listed delinquent storm-water and sewer charges, fees for the board-up, and additional charges, totalling $11,465.67. Arleen stared blankly at the bill. The amount was more than her annual income.

As Sherrena reclaimed her seat, she remembered her first eviction. Nervous and confused, she had gone over the paperwork a dozen times. Everything went her way, giving her the power to have sheriff deputies remove the family in question within ten days. Soon afterward, she filed another eviction suit, then another. When filling out the court papers, Sherrena learned to put "et al." after a tenant's name, so that the eviction judgment covered everyone in the house, even people she didn't know about. She learned that commissioners frowned on late fees in excess of fifty-five dollars, and that dragging slow-paying tenants to court was usually worth the $89.50 processing fee, because it spurred many of them to find a way to catch up. Plus, she could add the processing fee to their rent bill.

Time passed. The lawyers had gone home; their cases were called first. Finally, two hours after arriving at the courthouse, Sherrena was summoned. She had drawn Commissioner Laura Gramling Perez, a white woman in a dark pants suit and pearls, with a military posture and a broad, open face. Arleen waited while she and Sherrena settled another matter in her office.

"Any luck with that invoice?" Gramling Perez asked.

The day before, Sherrena had asked Gramling Perez to approve a claim of five thousand dollars which she had brought against an evicted tenant. Each eviction case had two parts. The first "cause of action" dealt strictly with whether a tenant would be evicted. Next came the second and third causes of action, which dealt with what was owed to a landlord: unpaid rent, court fees, and other damages. Most tenants who were sued for eviction were taken to court twice, once for the eviction and then for the debt. But even fewer tenants showed up for their second hearing, which meant that landlords' claims for what was owed them usually went unchallenged.

Suing a tenant for back rent and court fees was straightforward. Landlords were allowed to charge for unpaid rent, late fees that the court found reasonable, and double rent for each day that tenants remained in the home after their tenancy had been terminated. Things got murkier when tallying up property damages. Sometimes Sherrena guessed an amount on the ride over to eviction court: "How much should I put for the back door? One-fifty? Two hundred?" Sometimes she added on an extermination fee, even though Quentin would take care of it himself. Gramling Perez was now asking Sherrena to provide evidence that would justify suing an ex-tenant for the maximum amount allowed in small-claims court.

"What I'm trying to get from her doesn't even scratch the surface of what she did to the property," Sherrena replied, presenting photos of a trashed unit and the same bill she had shown to Arleen.

"I need something else," Gramling Perez said.

Sherrena pushed back but got nowhere. "I'll never get that anyway," she said, finally.

Gramling Perez reduced Sherrena's charges to $1,285. That money judgment joined those of eight other eviction cases that Sherrena had initiated earlier that month, which totalled more than ten thousand dollars in estimated lost rent and damages. Sherrena, who netted an equivalent amount each month after her bills were paid, knew that receiving a money judgment and actually receiving the money were different matters. Beyond withholding tenants' security deposits, landlords had limited recourse when it came to collecting. Sherrena could try to garnish wages, but only for former tenants who were employed and living above the poverty line. She could garnish bank accounts. But many of her former tenants did not have bank accounts, and, even if they did, state benefits and the first thousand dollars were off limits.

When her turn came, Arleen decided to sit next to Sherrena at the commissioner's desk. The two women looked for a moment like old friends or even sisters, with one reflecting life's favor. Without lifting her eyes from Arleen's file, Gramling Perez said, "Your landlady is seeking to evict you for unpaid rent. Are you behind on rent, Ma'am?"

"Yes," Arleen replied.

Gramling Perez looked at Sherrena and asked, "Are you willing to work something out?"

"No," Sherrena answered. "Because, the thing is, she's too far behind. See, I let her slide when the sister passed away or whatever. She didn't pay all her rent that month. And now it's another whole month has passed."

"Do you have minor children at home?" Gramling Perez asked Arleen. She was one of the commissioners who sometimes subscribed to the court custom of giving tenants two extra days in the home for each dependent child.

"I'll be out before the first," Arleen said. "New Year's at the latest."

"But, see, that goes into the beginning of rental period again," Sherrena interjected.

"So you're willing to do a stipulation if she's gone before the first?" Gramling Perez asked. She knew that Arleen would have to leave, but she was trying to spare her the blemish of another eviction. The Housing Authority counted evictions and unpaid debt as strikes when reviewing applications, and landlords turned away applicants with recent evictions, which were displayed free of charge on a government Web site. But Arleen's record was not as extensive as it should have been. Through the years, she had given landlords different names; nothing exotic, just subtle alterations. Now "Arleen Beal" and "Erleen Belle" had eviction records. The court clerks, like many landlords, never stopped to ask for identification.

Gramling Perez asked Sherrena if she would dismiss the eviction if Arleen moved out voluntarily by the thirty-first.

"But what about the other money that she owes me?" Sherrena asked. A dismissed eviction judgment could mean a dropped money judgment as well.

"Well, my point is that you maybe give up a couple hundred dollars so you don't lose these tenants who are coming in January." Gramling Perez knew that Sherrena could pocket Arleen's security deposit, leaving an unpaid rent balance of around three hundred and twenty dollars. Turning to Arleen, she said, "In exchange for an agreement that she won't go after you-"

Arleen interrupted: " I'm not trying to be in her money."

Sherrena leaned forward in her chair. "I don't want to dismiss anything. I really don't. . . . I mean, I'm tired of losing out on every single -" She began slapping the table with each word.

Arleen looked at Gramling Perez. "I mean, I'm not trying to stay. I mean, I understand what she's saying. That's her place."

"I understand," Gramling Perez said.

"I'm not trying to be there."

"I understand." Gramling Perez shuffled the papers in Arleen's file and said nothing more.

Arleen thought of all the problems with the Thirteenth Street apartment: the broken window, the sporadic hot water, the grimy carpet. "I would say something, but I'm not even gonna go there. I'm all right," she said. That was her defense. A lawyer would have fought much harder, likely to a different end. When tenants have legal representation, their chances of keeping their homes increase dramatically. A program that ran in the South Bronx from 2005 to 2008, for example, provided legal assistance to more than thirteen hundred families and prevented eviction in more than eighty-five per cent of the cases, saving New York City hundreds of thousands of dollars in estimated shelter costs. But, unlike in criminal court, in civil court the poor have no right to appointed counsel. Arleen was on her own.

Gramling Perez looked at Arleen. "Here's the deal. Ma'am, you're getting to move out voluntarily by January 1st," she said. "If you don't do that, if you don't move out, then your landlord is entitled to come back here without further notice, and she can get a writ of eviction. And then the sheriff will come."

Outside the courthouse, a gentle snow was falling. Sherrena had agreed to give Arleen a ride home. In the car, Sherrena paused to rub her neck, and Arleen lowered her forehead into the palm of her hand. Both had splitting headaches. Sherrena attributed hers to how court had gone. She was still fuming that Gramling Perez had reduced her money judgment. Arleen's was from hunger. She hadn't eaten all day.

"I don't want to be putting you and your babies out in the cold," Sherrena told Arleen as the car moved slowly through the slushy streets. "I wouldn't want nobody to do me like that. . . . Some of them landlords, they get away with murder down there. But there's some like me, who get in front of the commissioner, and she say whatever's on her mind, and that's the way it's gonna go. . . . She knows this system is screwed. It's all one-sided."

Arleen stared out the window and watched the snow settle noiselessly on the iron lampposts, the ornate dome of the Public Library, the Church of the Gesu's Gothic towers.

"And some of these tenants," Sherrena was saying, "they nasty as hell. They bring roaches with 'em. They bring mice with 'em. And who gotta pay for it? Then you pouring grease down the sink from your fried chicken, you pouring the grease down the sink, and I gotta get a plumber out again."

The car turned down Center Street, passing a church where Arleen sometimes picked up gift baskets at Thanksgiving and Christmas. She had always aspired to have her own ministry like that, to be the one handing out food and clothing.

"So, Arleen," Sherrena said as she pulled up in front of the house on Thirteenth Street, "if you ever thinking about becoming a landlord, don't. It's a bad deal. Get the short end of the stick every time."

Arleen stepped out of the car and turned back to Sherrena. "Merry Christmas," she said. ♦

Matthew Desmond is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard. His book "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City" will be published next month.
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Arleen Beale's latest eviction began with a snowball fight. It was January of 2008, and Milwaukee was experiencing its snowiest winter on record. Arleen's son Jori and his cousin were cutting up, packing powder tight and taking aim at the passing cars on Arthur Avenue.

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An photo of an eviction happening, with the homeowners items getting moved into a storage facility.

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Matthew Desmond talks about the research behind evictions and how it all connects to the affordable housing crisis of 2008.

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Dalton Conley and Matt Desmond discuss his research on eviction patterns and the housing crisis

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Matthew Desmond discusses his research on eviction patterns in Milwaukee and explains eviction's connection to America's affordable-housing crisis. Quotations from this interview are included in Chapter 10 of "You May Ask Yourself, 4th edition."

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How to help families like the ones in the novel avoid becoming evicted.

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Evicted tells the story of eight families swept up in the nation's eviction epidemic and lays out fresh ideas for solving this devastating problem.

"A groundbreaking work ... Desmond delivers a gripping, novelistic narrative... This stunning, remarkable book - a scholar's 21st-century How the Other Half Lives - demands a wide audience."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"This is an extraordinary and crucial piece of work. Read it. Please, read it."-Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of
Random Family

"Gripping storytelling and meticulous research ... Desmond identifies affordable housing as a leading social justice issue of our time and offers concrete solutions to the crisis."
-Publishers Weekly (starred)

"This story is about one of the most basic human needs-a roof overhead-and yet Matthew Desmond has told it in sweeping, immersive, heartbreaking fashion."-Jeff Hobbs, author of
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

"Evicted is that rare book that both enlightens and serves as an urgent call for action.", Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University, and author of
-William Julius Wilson When Work Disappears

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Millions of American families face eviction every year. We can change that. Just Shelter features links to over 600 organizations working to preserve affordable housing, prevent eviction, and reduce family homelessness, and presents stories from Americans who have faced eviction.

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Author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

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In Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, author Matthew Desmond goes into the poorest neighborhoods in Milwaukee and tags along with eight families to see how they live.

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Evicted has 12,828 ratings and 2,337 reviews. Jennifer said: This just won The Pulitzer! Yay! Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is proba...

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Located in the South side of Milwaukee, characters who lived here were Scott, Teddy, Larraine, Pam and Ned, Lenny, and Office Susie.