Poverty and housing policy in the US

It's official: "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City" is a great book. Last month, it received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and it is on the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2016. The author, Matthew Desmond, a professor of social sciences at Harvard and former MacArthur "Genius Grant" recipient, posits that the modern phenomenon of mass evictions is less the consequence, and more the cause, of poverty.

Desmond's reportage is stunning: For almost two years, he embedded into a ramshackle, code-violating trailer park and then an impoverished urban, mostly black neighborhood. He studied eight families - black, white, with children and without - interacting with two landlords in Milwaukee in 2008-2009 and caught up in the process of being evicted. We come to know Arleen, a single mother raising her two sons on the $20 she has left each month after paying the rent; Scott, a nurse spiraling downward in heroin addiction; Lamar, a man with no legs trying to protect a small cadre of at-risk blunt-smoking young black men hoping to reach adulthood. Each is pretty much out of money and behind in the rent. These are hard, unremittingly chaotic lives with violence is never far away, promoted by untreated mental health disorder and substance abuse.

But what is a landlord to do? Shereena, a former school teacher and current "inner-city entrepreneur" had the guts to take big risks, and has come to own and operate 36 rental units catering to chronically impoverished renters in the city's near north side. She has obligations; big ones including past-due taxes and penalties running to five figures. She's counting on the rent and there is no slack she can provide. She's not heartless - just clear eyed. Desmond describes her many acts of selfless giving to her deeply needy defaulting tenants. But "love don't pay the bills," she explains.

Tobin, the owner of the trailer park, is likewise reality-based. On a given month, some 40 of his hundred or so tenants are behind in rent. Tobin has made big promises of code violation remediation to the local authorities who want to shut him down - which all involved recognize would cast dozens of his tenants into homelessness. Tobin wears a green eyeshade and has a sharp pencil: For a given defaulting tenant, he needs to decide - carry the debt a bit longer or evict? Evictions too cost money and there is a subtle calculus to be made. But when it gets hostile, it's no longer subtle: The tenant is out.

But mostly the landlords wield the eviction process as a final, diamond-hard negotiating ultimatum: "pay or else." What is the "else"? Desmond shows us: A tsunami of dislocation the tenants know well. First, a mad scramble to find new housing during which often the tenant and her children live in shelters, on grudging relatives' couches or on the street. Following her latest eviction, one of Sherrenna's tenants contacted 90 (!) landlords, imploring each to let her and her children move in before one agreed to take the risk. Second, the Sheriff's Department moving all your possessions from the rental unit, often to the street - a process informally referred to "curb service." Third, pulling your children yet again out of one school and into another, undoing whatever momentum, consistency and predictability the children may have briefly enjoyed at school. Arleen's son Jori attended five schools during his seventh and eighth grades. Fourth (and here is where Desmond's insights really shine), the cascade of psychological damage to adults and children, including clinical depression, that flows from the lost centrality of "home." It's bigger than one family - forced dislocation also decimates neighborhood stability. This is how, Desmond demonstrates, the storm of forced relocation results in more poverty.

But "Evicted" is not a morality play. The caricatures of greedy heartless landlord and conniving deadbeat tenant are inapt as applied to the three dimensional humans the reader comes to know. The operative economic and social forces dwarf mere human volition - and all the players in the drama are relegated to a "do what you gotta do" mode. That is not to say Desmond gives anyone a pass: bad personal choices, we see, beget very bad foreseeable outcomes but Desmond's mission is not to chronicle accountability of that sort.

Desmond's scholarship is likewise excellent. He provides 61 pages of single-spaced end notes containing scholarly references and statistics on housing, poverty, crime and evictions, and a fascinating chapter on his study methodology. Having found insufficient published data on the incidence and prevalence of eviction and its consequences, Desmond undertook and published the Milwaukee Area Renters' Study involving more than 1,100 respondents. He also pored over eviction court records, resulting in the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study. One finding: During one six week period, in 945 out of 1,328 cases, the tenants never appeared in court and judgment was entered against them. Another finding: Of those tenants who did show up, about a third cut a deal with the landlord that day in court. He analyzed two years of nuisance property citations directed to landlords from the Milwaukee Police Department, whose policy on such citations is "to close the file" once the landlord reports he or she had commenced eviction proceedings against the tenant accused of creating the nuisance. Landlords subject to such citations received a form letter from the Milwaukee PD: "This notice serves to inform you that your written course of action is accepted." Thus do fights, teenagers' vandalism and dog bites likewise result in eviction.

Ultimately, Desmond proposes a vastly increased housing voucher system for the poor. His premise is that there is a huge net cost savings overall, in both money and human capital, for society in the mid- and long-run. To those who would dismiss this as yet another Ivy League lefty wealth redistributionist solution, Desmond requires confronting current tax policy - the enormous, regressive tax benefit to the middle and upper class for their housing needs and whims in the form of the mortgage interest deduction. There is no comparable benefit for the poor who need it at least as much, he argues. Why is that fair, he asks?

Lawyers and judicial officers will be particularly interested in Desmond's observations of the legal proceedings of eviction. He describes a system in Milwaukee with which, despite his tone of academic dispassion, one can see he is not much impressed. Most tenants do not appear for their hearing and the court clerks with machine-like efficiency process writs of possession. (The sound of the clerks' "stamp stamp stamp" pervades the crowded eviction hearing room.) In those cases in which tenants do appear, it is the landlords who complain. They say the judicial officers strong arm them into accepting settlements involving a payment plan and often overlooking decrepit and unsafe conditions but keeping the tenant in possession, or the tenant's promise to vacate on a date certain in exchange for forgiveness of debt and avoidance of the stigma of a formal judgment of eviction. But the tenants in those cases do not see such outcomes as a win.

The serious process and substantive problems found in eviction litigation warrant their own book. Desmond touches but does not examine them closely. This is a subject of great interest in Los Angeles where nearly 60 percent of the residents of the city live in rental units. Readers may be surprised to learn that unlawful detainer (UD) disputes are by far the most common matters being tried in civil trial departments, by judicial officer, and increasingly by jury, in the Los Angeles County Superior Court nowadays. This is a new phenomenon. A trained observer would do well to examine and report on the effects of this change on historically fraught landlord-tenant relations, already a remarkably complex mixture of free market capitalism, housing shortage, gentrification, government imposed rent control, agency oversight and enforcement of habitability and building safety, and whistleblower protections.

At least one chapter of that book should examine the law and custom regarding sealing, or non-sealing, of court eviction records. Landlords are keenly interested in a prospective tenant's past rent payment history. Vendors aggregate unlawful detainer judgment information from public files and sell it to landlords. The possibility of a UD record being sealed is quite valuable for the tenant who, facing eviction, knows she must seek new housing. Sealing vs. non-sealing the UD court file becomes a key negotiation point for both sides. Another chapter might examine access to justice issues in UD litigation. And there are some surprises there to be seen: many landlords are modifying leases to place a cap, usually $500, on boilerplate attorney fees provisions. Why? Because experience shows they can lose UD cases too. Again, another book for another day one hopes.

Poverty and housing policy are huge topics. Grasping even their scope is overwhelming to the casual reader. While we can get some sense by studying statistics and data, for many of us the other side of our head needs to feel how these macro issues affect real people in real time. "Evicted" is a portal of access to these whirlwind problems. It is for good reason this fine book has achieved its acclaim.