What’s the difference between eviction and Hurricane Katrina? Eviction and poverty are not the result of weather conditions or terrorism? Eviction is happening to many people simultaneously, and it meets FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate’s definition of a disaster as “An emergency in which the injuries or victims outnumber responders or the resources available.”
We have a housing surplus. How is that the housing market then yields such a high number of evictions? Shouldn’t rents go down in a market economy with a housing overage?
From Erik Eckholm‘s story A Sight All Too Familiar in Poor Neighborhoods
“When you see the Eagle movers truck, you know it’s time to get going,” a neighbor said.
On Milwaukee’s impoverished North Side, the mover’s name is nearly as familiar as McDonald’s, because Eagle often accompanies sheriffs on evictions. They haul tenants’ belongings into storage or, as Ms. Smith preferred, leave them outside for tenants to truck away.
Here and in swaths of many cities, evictions from rental properties are so common that they are part of the texture of life. New research is showing that eviction is a particular burden on low-income black women, often single mothers, who have an easier time renting apartments than their male counterparts, but are vulnerable to losing them because their wages or public benefits have not kept up with the cost of housing.
And evictions, in turn, can easily throw families into cascades of turmoil and debt.
“Just as incarceration has become typical in the lives of poor black men, eviction has become typical in the lives of poor black women,” said Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin whose research on trends in Milwaukee since 2002 provides a rare portrait of gender patterns in inner-city rentals.
The study found that one of every 25 renter-occupied households in the city is evicted each year. In black neighborhoods, the rate is one in 14. These figures include only court-ordered evictions; the true toll, experts say, is greater because far more tenants, under threat of eviction, move in with relatives, into more run-down apartments or, sometimes, into homeless shelters.
Women from largely black neighborhoods in Milwaukee constitute 13 percent of the city’s population, but 40 percent of those evicted. Housing lawyers in Los Angeles and New York described a similar predominance of minority women, including Hispanic women, in eviction cases. (The figures do not include displaced renters from foreclosed properties.)
Even for working mothers, evictions and the ensuing damage to social ties, schooling and credit ratings can be an ever-hovering threat. Clarissa Adams, 38, a mother of three in Milwaukee, has been evicted four times in 10 years and is now trying desperately to break the pattern.
Since July she has shared a $570-a-month two-bedroom apartment with her daughters, ages 15, 18 and 23, and two small grandchildren. She is studying for a degree in social services and lost her job as a cashier in the fall after a dispute with her boss.
Unable to pay the last three months rent, Ms. Adams received some emergency assistance through Community Advocates, a private group. To stave off eviction, she promised to pay the landlord $1,000 by Feb. 15, just as her tax refund arrived. She owes an additional $955 by March 1 and hopes to scrape the money together while she looks for a job.
Previous evictions sent her into a deep depression, she said, and had temporarily split up the family, with her children staying a relative who did not want her.
“We just need someplace where we can be a family,” Ms. Adams said.
(Emphasis supplied).
From A Sight All Too Familiar in Poor Neighborhoods. On NYTimes.com