eviction

For almost a century, there has been broad consensus in America that families should spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Until recently, most renting families met this goal. But times have changed__n Milwaukee and across America. Every year in this country, people are evicted from their homes not by the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands but by the millions.

The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. 10 After the numbers were released, Milwaukee__ chief of police appeared on the local news and puzzled over the fact that many victims had never contacted the police for help. A nightly news reporter summed up the chief__ views: __e believes that if police were contacted more often, that victims would have the tools to prevent fatal situations from occurring in the future._ What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department__ own rules presented battered women with a devil__ bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction.

It was an old tradition: landlords barring children from their properties. In the competitive postwar housing market of the late 1940s, landlords regularly turned away families with children and evicted tenants who got pregnant. This was evident in letters mothers wrote when applying for public housing. __t present,_ one wrote, __ am living in an unheated attic room with a one-year-old baby_ Everywhere I go the landlords don__ want children. I also have a ten-year-old boy_ I can__ keep him with me because the landlady objects to children. Is there any way that you can help me to get an unfurnished room, apartment, or even an old barn?_ I can__ go on living like this because I am on the verge of doing something desperate._ Another mother wrote, __y children are now sick and losing weight_ I have tried, begged, and pleaded for a place but [it__] always __oo late_ or __orry, no children.___ Another wrote, __he lady where I am rooming put two of my children out about three weeks ago and don__ want me to let them come back_ If I could get a garage I would take it.__hen Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, it did not consider families with children a protected class, allowing landlords to continue openly turning them away or evicting them.

In white neighborhoods, only 1 in 41 properties that could have received a nuisance citation actually did receive one. In black neighborhoods, 1 in 16 eligible properties received a citation. A woman reporting domestic violence was far more likely to land her landlord a nuisance citation if she lived in the inner city.In the vast majority of cases (83 percent), landlords who received a nuisance citation for domestic violence responded by either evicting the tenants or by threatening to evict them for future police calls. Sometimes, this meant evicting a couple, but most of the time landlords evicted women abused by men who did not live with them.

For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetually behind; and many poor tenants would be perpetually behind because their rent was too high.

But it was not enough simply to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them__hich was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.

But this house felt strange. Dave asked what was going on, and John explained that the name on the eviction order belonged to the mother of several of the children. She had died two months earlier, and the children had simply gone on living in the house, by themselves. As the movers swept through the rooms, Gray Eyes took charge, giving orders to the other children; the youngest was a boy of about eight or nine. Upstairs, the movers found ratty mattresses on the floor and empty liquor bottles displayed like trophies. In the damp basement, clothes were flung everywhere. The house and the yard were littered with trash. __isgusting,_ Tim said to the roaches scaling the kitchen wall. As the landlord changed the locks with a power drill and the movers pushed the contents of the house onto the wet curb, the children began to run around and laugh. When the move was done, the crew gathered by the trucks, instinctively stomping the ground to shake loose any stowaway roaches. Those who smoked reached for their packs. They didn__ know where the children would go, and they didn__ ask.

Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on our next generation.

Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.

Poor black families were __mmersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,_ wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did little to lift families out of poverty, but it was enough to keep them afloat. But large-scale social transformations__he crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them__ad frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit __in dependence_ by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.

Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They __elped get rid of the riffraff,_ some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.In years past, renters opposed landlords and saw themselves as a __lass_ with shared interests and a unified purpose. During the early twentieth century, tenants organized against evictions and unsanitary conditions. When landlords raised rents too often or too steeply, tenants went so far as to stage rent strikes. Strikers joined together to withhold rent and form picket lines, risking eviction, arrest, and beatings by hired thugs. They were not an especially radical bunch, these strikers. Most were ordinary mothers and fathers who believed landlords were entitled to modest rent increases and fair profits, but not __rice gouging._ In New York City, the great rent wars of the Roaring Twenties forced a state legislature to impose rent controls that remain the country__ strongest to this day.Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience__his kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision.

Often, evicted families also lose the opportunity to benefit from public housing because Housing Authorities count evictions and unpaid debt as strikes when reviewing applications. And so people who have the greatest need for housing assistance__he rent-burdened and evicted__re systematically denied it.

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.

When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond_by neglecting repairs. Or as Sherrena put it to tenants: __f I give you a break, you give me a break._ Tenants could trade their dignity and children__ health for a roof over their head. 13 Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem. 14 More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems__s were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did_not. Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted. But from a business point of view, this arrangement could be lucrative.

We all have individually special kingdoms of success in each of us. Obedience is the throne of those kingdoms without which the real person we are is sure to suffer eviction.

One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate 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. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a __ignificant precursor of suicide._ The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. __viction must be considered a traumatic rejection,_ they wrote, __ denial of one__ most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience._ Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.

One's sovereignty over the land is expressed most powerfully in the act of banishment. Perhaps the first eviction recorded in human history was Adam and Eve's.

Some children are threatened with loss of privileges such as money, cell phones, cars or even eviction from home if they do not 'toe-the-line' and 'act straight'. I don't think parents who do such things consider for a moment the kind of emotional damage they are doing to their children - or thinking beyond their own feelings about the situation - which will not change or go away simply because of their denial.