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Managing Director
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Matthew Desmond’s new book
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is just being
released today, but it has already generated an amazing buzz which started
with an article in the
New Yorker a
few weeks back, and has continued with reviews and commentary in major news
outlets across the country. His bottom line conclusion that “without stable
shelter everything else falls apart” is a message that housing advocates have
long felt keenly. Given that the country’s serious housing challenges have
failed to make an appearance at any Presidential debate, the substantial public
attention the book is generating is profoundly important.
I got the chance to read an advance copy of the book myself and
finished it this past weekend. As someone familiar with Desmond’s work and with
a strong interest in trying to bring attention to the desperate straits that some
11 million renter households face by having to devote more than half their
income to rent, I expected to be moved by the book’s up-close-and-personal
depiction of struggling renters in Milwaukee. While I was certainly moved, what
I didn’t expect was how challenged I would be by Desmond’s account.
The Joint Center for Housing Studies has for many years been
documenting both the magnitude and consequences of a lack of affordable housing
through meticulous analysis of national survey data to help fuel the policy
debate. But while numbers may inform the head, they don’t move the heart and so
by themselves have a hard time moving the needle on policy. Housing advocates
have come to appreciate the importance of personal stories in putting a face on
the numbers. The
Make Room campaign, launched by Enterprise Community
Partners in the past year, is a particularly effective attempt at documenting powerful
stories of struggling renters to help sway hearts as well as minds.
Desmond’s stories are also powerful, but in a very different
way. The Enterprise campaign focuses on people who have been undone by sickness
and other life events outside their control, who struggle to make a decent
living, not from lack of trying, but by a lack of good paying jobs. In
contrast, Evicted largely tells the
story of people who are dealing with what often seem like self-inflicted wounds—drug
addiction and questionable choices about how they spend what little money they
have, people who are prone to violence and seem to make only sporadic attempts
to work. In short, while Enterprise shines on a light on the so-called
‘deserving poor,’ Desmond doesn’t shy away—in fact, seems to seek out—the “undeserving”
poor; people whose own families and social networks often refuse to offer
assistance.
But through the course of the book, and with the support of
hundreds of footnotes that draw on the academic literature and put forth more
of Desmond’s own arguments, he builds a convincing case for how the
circumstances of grinding poverty lead to choices that otherwise might be hard
to understand and how drug addiction and a history of abuse and deprivation exert
a powerful tide that is extremely hard to escape. In short, Desmond forces readers
to confront their own embedded notions of the “deserving poor.”
One of the most thought-provoking aspects of the book for me
was a footnote that confronts this issue directly. Desmond notes that liberals
tend to ignore the “nastier, more embarrassing aspects of poverty.” Citing
William Julius Wilson, he argues that this approach will ultimately fail to
garner support anyway as the public wants to see these behaviors taken into
account. Lambasting this approach, Desmond writes, “There are two ways to
dehumanize: the first is to strip people of all virtue; the second is to
cleanse them of sin.” He’s right. We do need to construct a policy argument that
accounts for the sinners as well as the saints—not least of all because no
one’s a saint.
Evicted has also challenged
my thinking about how the housing market operates at the lowest rungs of the ladder.
On its face, the rental market would appear to fit the classic competitive
model: there are many buyers and many sellers, information on rent levels is fairly
easily available, and there are few barriers to becoming a landlord. Sure, rents
are quite high relative to property values, but wouldn’t high maintenance costs,
the very real risk of non-payment of rent, and the costs of carrying out
evictions account for the high rents? Maybe in part. But the examples Desmond
details suggest that, even after taking these costs of doing business into
account, the returns earned by landlords are extremely high. The most telling example
is the $16,900 house in relatively good condition in a stable block. The
mortgage payment on such a small mortgage would be less than $100 monthly. Even
with property taxes and maintenance factored in, it wouldn’t take much rent to earn
a decent return. And he notes the landlord had acquired other properties for as
little as $5,000.
So why aren’t these markets more competitive? One barrier to
entry is the lack of access to capital by those who are looking to live in
these neighborhoods. Given what’s involved in managing these properties, there
may be few landlords who are willing to take on property ownership under these
conditions, limiting competition. Landlords also have over a barrel those tenants
with a history of eviction, a criminal record, or no visible means of support.
With the need for housing so fundamental, landlords can extract the lion’s
share of a household’s income. As Desmond notes, researchers have focused a
great deal of attention on the provision of subsidized housing but very little
on the supply of non-subsidized, low-cost rental housing where a large majority
of the poor find their homes. As this book makes clear, this is a major
oversight.
So what does Desmond propose as policy responses? To begin
with, he advocates for an entitlement program for low-income renters to obtain
housing vouchers in the private market. This proposal is actually not that
radical, as the Bipartisan Policy Center Housing Commission made this same
recommendation. There is a strong case for such a policy, particularly for
those at risk of homelessness who are profiled in
Evicted. The short-term outcomes report by Abt Associates for the
Family Options Study provides compelling evidence that providing housing vouchers to
families coming out of the shelter system produces more stable living
situations, reduces domestic violence and substance abuse, keeps families
together, and reduces the number of school moves among children. And it
achieves these results at no greater cost than the traditional assistance
families receive coming out of shelters. Desmond also advocates for publicly
provided legal assistance for renters in eviction hearings. Given the stories
presented in
Evicted, there is a
clear need to level the playing field between landlords and tenants. If tenants
have access to universal vouchers, landlords will have less to worry about in
terms of unpaid rent.
The one part of Desmond’s recommendations that puzzled me is
that he suggests relaxing housing quality standards as part of a universal
voucher program to entice more landlords to participate. He argues in a
footnote that in countries where such programs exist without quality standards,
tenants are able to use the market power of their voucher to choose higher
quality units. But given how the current system exploits renters’
vulnerabilities to accept appalling housing conditions, I would worry about
leaving the market to determine this outcome.
In fact, Desmond makes a forceful case that exploitation of
the poor thrives when it comes to essentials like housing and food. For that
reason it might also have been useful to consider including some
recommendations about expanding property ownership among those who would be less
likely to exploit the poor—including the poor themselves. In cities like
Milwaukee where home prices in inner city neighborhoods are so low,
homeownership may be a cost-effective solution for some. More ownership of
low-cost rentals by the public or non-profit sectors could also provide needed
competition for for-profit landlords.
What’s also missing from his recommendations are supports
beyond just rental assistance that are needed to address some of the root
causes of instability, such as treatment for addiction and mental health
disorders. Housing assistance is a critical step but by itself may not be
sufficient to help people become stable tenants. But Desmond is focused on the
housing part of the equation and so can’t be faulted for looking at all the
ways we need to shore up our social safety net.
Overall, Evicted
tells a powerful story and presents persuasive evidence about the fundamental
importance of housing instability as a cause
and a consequence of poverty, and in the process makes a compelling case for
the need to foster housing stability as part of efforts to address poverty. Evicted is that rare book that will
generate spirited thought and discussion not only among a general audience but also
among those of us who spend a great deal of time trying to understand the
critical interplay between housing affordability, poverty, and social mobility.
--
On Thursday, March
3 at 6 PM The Malcom Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School is holding a
book launch event for “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” with
author Matthew Desmond, Co-director of their Center’s Justice and Poverty
Project, along with a distinguished panel. View their event flier >
