One winter day, a 14-year-old living in Milwaukee was throwing snowballs at passing cars. Someone got out of the car, chased the boy to his home and kicked down the door. The landlord learned about the incident and immediately evicted the boy, his younger brother and his mother, Eileen.
Eileen’s small family was soon homeless, and that eviction blemish on her rental record pushed the family into worse living conditions and unsafe neighborhoods. At one point, looking for a landlord who would accept her application for a rental took 90 phone calls.
“When we think of the typical low-income family today, we should not think of them living in public housing or benefiting in any kind of way from the government when meeting basic housing needs,” said Matthew Desmond, an associate professor of social sciences at Harvard University and co-director of the Justice and Poverty Project. “We should think someone like Eileen.”
Desmond is the author of “Evicted: Poverty & Profit in the American City,” which documents his extensive research on the increase in evictions in America and the devastating consequences for poor families. In Milwaukee, one in five black women report having been evicted in their adult life, compared to one in 15 white women.
“That should trouble us, because that means that eviction for black women is currently like black men’s equivalent to incarceration,” Desmond said. “We know that many of our black men are being locked up. Many of our black women are being locked out, and they are bearing the brunt of the eviction crisis.”
On April 6, Desmond told Eileen’s story during the Equal Housing Opportunity Council’s daylong conference on evictions, which was hosted at Washington University.
Eileen spends about 88 percent of her monthly income on rent, not including utilities – and this has become a typical case for low-income renting families in America today, Desmond said. For about 100 years, Desmond said there has been a consensus in America that families should spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs – leaving enough money for food and other important necessities.
“And for a long part of our history, most renters met that goal,” he said. “But times have changed.”
Today, 30 percent of renting families in America spend at least half of their monthly income on housing costs. For renting families below the poverty line, the majority – or 52 percent – spend half of their income on rent and keeping the lights on, he said. One in four of poor families spend more than 70 percent on rent and utilities.
“How did we get to this place where 70 percent of your income is gone at the end of month if you want a roof over your head and hot water for one in four poor-income families?” he asked.
For the past 40 years, those with less than a high school education have seen their income flat-lined, while housing costs have soared, Desmond said. Between 1995 and today, renting costs have increased by 70 percent adjusting for inflation, he said. Since 2000, costs of fuel and utilities has risen by more than 53 percent, while median incomes for people with high-school degrees rose by only 7.3 percent.
“So you might ask, ‘Where is public housing in all of this?’” he said. “Well, it’s there for the lucky minority of families who benefit from it.”
Two-thirds of poor renters today do not benefit from federal housing programs. In 2013, 15 percent of poor renters lived in public housing and 17 percent received a government subsidy, mainly in the form of a rent-reducing voucher. The remaining 67 percent received nothing, Desmond said.
When Eileen sought public housing assistance, he said, she was told that the list had been frozen for five years with 3,500 families on it. She would most likely have to wait three or more years until the list unfroze and then another three to four years for her application to make it to the top of the pile for review. Then she would have to pray that the person reviewing her application would ignore all her evictions, Desmond said.
Desmond suggested extending the federal housing vouchers (Section 8) to everyone under the federal poverty line – the vouchers pay the rent for housing that requires more than 30 percent of a renter’s income.
“When families receive this ticket that allows them to pay only 30 percent of their income on housing, they do one consistent thing with their money,” Desmond said. “They take it to the grocery store. They buy more food. Their kids become stronger and less anemic. They are a blessing for the lucky minority who benefit from it.”
However, the vast majority of children aren’t getting enough to eat, he said. He argues that access to a decent affordable home should be affirmed as a basic American right – just like provision in old age, access to 12 years of education and basic nutrition.
“Housing should be a right in this country, and the reason is very simple,” he said. “Without stable housing, everything else falls apart.”
According to one think tank, the cost for such an initiative would be about $22 billion – not accounting for savings from decrease in costs for homeless shelters and other services, Desmond said.
While Eileen was being evicted in 2008, the country spent $171 billion on the homeowner tax expenditures and mortgage interest deduction, which mainly benefitted families with six-figure incomes, he said. Most white families in America own homes with a mortgage and thus are eligible for one of the “most generous breaks in our tax code,” he said. Most black and Latino families do not own homes and thus are left out of this savings. These tax breaks for the wealthy far outweigh housing assistance to the needy, which was $41 billion for Section 8 that same year.
“We already have a national housing program,” Desmond said. “It’s an entitlement. It’s just not for poor people. It’s really hard to imagine a social policy that more successfully and unblushingly amplifies our racial and economic inequality than our current housing policy does.”
