Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

     Evicted is a book that's been on my list forever. Like since it came out. I am only just now getting around to reading it because I started volunteering with the Legal Aid project Eviction Free Milwaukee and people mentioned the book. So I realized I had to read THE book about evictions, which is set in Milwaukee. I can see the reason for the book's success. Desmond doesn't just write a book about eviction; he tells the stories of people involved in landlord/tenant issues as if a novel and explains the phenomenon of eviction through their stories.

    So throughout the book, you get lots of narrative, and then a fact like this: "Since 1970, the number of people primarily employed as property managers has more than quadrupled. As more landlords began buying more property and thinking of themselves as landlords (instead of people who happened to own the unit downstairs), professional associations proliferated, and with them support services, accreditations, training materials, and financial instruments." Desmond also makes important observations, like when he echoes Jane Jacobs that, "A single eviction could destabilize multiple city blocks, not only the block from which a family was evicted but also the block to which it was begrudgingly located." These places become perpetual slums with high turnover, preventing people from forming any sort of community. And Desmond's use of a family as an example is not accidental. Families and single mothers get evicted more often. Having kids makes eviction more likely because kids become expenses and do things that get their parents in trouble with the landlord. Families suffer additionally in the screening process. Landlords of course screen for a criminal record, but also screen for evictions. This means that criminals and people with evictions get forced to live together in worse places. And since the evicted are more likely to have kids, those kids end up having to live around criminals at a disproportionate rate.

    And it's not easy to move. Desmond points out that while the differences in quality of housing that exist are dramatic, the price differences are not so great. When he did his ethnographic study, median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee was $600, with ten percent of units below $480 and ten percent above $750. So just $270 monthly was separating the cheapest and most expensive units in the city, meaning that those in the worst units were overpaying while those in the best underpaid. So in the poorest neighborhoods, where at least 40% of families were below the poverty line, they only paid $50 less than the citywide median. But living in the worst apartments is much worse. At the time of the study, one in five renters in Milwaukee had a broken window, a busted appliance, or pests for more than three days. One third had clogged plumbing of over a day and one in ten spent a day without heat-- but average rent was almost the same as the good rentals.

    Over 70% of tenants summoned to Milwaukee's eviction court did not attend (when the book was published). In some places it is as high as 90%. Of tenants in eviction court, the majority spent over half their income on rent payments and a third spent 80% of their income that way. Of those who are evicted, only one in six have a place to stay. Three in four people in Milwaukee eviction court were black, and three in four of that group were women, The total number of black women in eviction court exceeded that of all other groups combined. In Milwaukee's poorest black neighborhoods, one female renter in seventeen was evicted through the court system every year, twice as often as men in those neighborhoods and nine times as often as women from the poorest white areas.  Women from black neighborhoods made up 9% of Milwaukee's population and 30% of its evicted tenants. It is additionally hard for women because they usually can't avoid eviction by laying concrete, patching roofs, or painting rooms. Men will usually approach their landlord with such an offer, but women are usually unable for reasons of physical strength sometimes, childcare obligations, or other work obligations. The more common thing for women to trade was sex for rent. The recession exacerbated the racial inequalities in Milwaukee further: between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11% drop in wealth, while the average black family lost 31% and the average Hispanic family 44%. The racial discrimination also came through in this book. The author himself did a blind test and ended up reporting a landlord, and Desmond also mentions how a white couple with felony convictions, an outstanding warrant, five daughters, and past evictions were able to get a place much quicker than two black women without nearly as much baggage.

    I also learned in this book about "nuisance abatement." These are policies that fine property owners if they are responsible for a certain number of 911 calls in a period of time. This means that they best way to avoid a fine is to evict a problem tenant-- who might be an abused woman or a family with children who have special needs. Also in the category of misplaced incentives are aid policies that sought to limit "kin dependence" by giving mothers who lived alone a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives. These have helped to break up families since people could get more money by living at different addresses. Another one is that a Social Security recipient can only get their SSI if they have less than $2,000 in the bank, which is an obvious disincentive to saving.

    What stuck out to me in this book, perhaps because of the flareup in the Israel-Palestine conflict right now, was how similar eviction is to deportation or other forced movements. While a genocide may use deportation as part of a catastrophic, ethnically-driven "movement" to make room for some people where others were not welcome, eviction is a continuous "movement" of undesirable people based on their poverty. And it is similarly disruptive to use the power of the state to drive people out of their homes on a continuous basis. Of course, it is this guarantee of state enforcement of private property rights that allows for so many homes to be used by those who need them, but I think now that the problem of enforcement has been solved, it is time to look at how to promote people staying in one place, or at least living where they want to live. It is unproductive to shuffle the poorest people in a city around constantly.

    Finally, Desmond proposes a system of housing vouchers to solve the problem of evictions. I found it unconvincing however. He proposes that every family below a certain income level be eligible for a voucher to live anywhere they want so long as they paid 30% of their income to housing costs. But this seems unviable to me because it would have the effect of dramatically increasing the cost of housing since landlords would just raise rates by an amount proportionate to the increase in spending from the voucher. And it also creates more perverse incentives since people will want to rent places without much regard to cost with the government absorbing 70%. I think the fundamental problem is supply and stock. Giving people more money doesn't actually mean there will be more good places to live. Nowadays, people want to live with more space, and the population is larger. I think that a voucher program could work (Desmond mentions some European countries that use it), but if it's not paired with large increases to good housing stock in cities, it will be counterproductive.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Milwaukee put a moratorium on gas disconnections, so even people who don't pay their bills will still get gas through April in the winter.
• Welfare stipends in Milwaukee have not kept up with inflation since 1997.
• Housing discrimination against children and families was finally outlawed in the 80s after it was discovered that only 1 in 4 rental units were available to families without restrictions. Despite this, housing discrimination against children and families continues.
• A one percent increase in portion of children in a neighborhood can be associated with a seven percent increase in evictions (as of 2010).

I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker

Coronavirus

    The Trump administration's Coronavirus response will go down in history as a case study in failed crisis management, which cost the country countless lives and cost Trump reelection. Initially, it seems like Trump's problem is that he did not want to damage his improving relationship with China when it seemed possible to enter into a trade deal in 2020. Trump consistently downplayed the virus through January and was quoted as bragging about his great relationship with Xi Jinping. He even tweeted about how much he appreciated China's "efforts and transparency." But by January 28th, he had been briefed that this pandemic would look less like SARS 2003 and more like 1918. There were already conversations about cutting off travel to and from China, but no decision was made until late January, and then restrictions on Europe in March. Indecision got even worse when Mike Pence was made the "Covid Czar." Pence didn't use his new powers, so the effect of making him the final decision-maker meant that no decisions got made, and one adviser described Pence as "just drifting around."

    It was also difficult to establish early on what the best precautionary measures were for people's personal health. From January through March, Fauci argued that facemasks were not necessary, but would reverse positions later on. However, Trump and other staffers in the White House solidified in this position, and resisted wearing facemasks. The Trump team also totally missed the importance of testing early on. As of March 12, only eleven thousand Americans had been tested for Coronavirus, less than the twenty thousand tests that South Korea was conducting DAILY. On March 16, Trump abdicated leadership on a phone call with the nation's governors, and told them that they were on their own for procuring supplies like ventilators, testing kits, and respirators. Within the White House, there was lots of debate about shutting down businesses, which could slow the virus, but tank the economy. Trump eventually announced restrictions with an end date of Easter (April 12), but they were later extended at the end of March to last through April. Trump was holding press conferences until April 23, when he embarrassed himself publicly by suggesting it was possible to inject bleach into the body or expose people's insides to UV light as a way to cure the virus. Trump would only make brief remarks after that, and on April 24, the US death toll reached 50,000. Not long after, White House resistance to masking became a public relations fiasco when Mike Pence appeared at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, without a mask on April 28. He had been tested daily, and so was pretty sure he didn't have Covid, but it wasn't a good look. The masks stayed a problem for Trump, and into November, he still insisted on anyone speaking in public taking off their mask, and even expressed shock and asked his Health Secretary, "they work?"

    One interesting thing about this book is that it pretty clearly endorses the "lab leak" theory of Covid's origin, as opposed to the wet market. They make three key arguments: (1) Covid's rapid and efficient transmissions were the fastest in modern history, unlikely for a zoonotic virus that jumped to humans, (2) the initial cluster of cases in Wuhan did not have contact with the wet market, and (3) the Wuhan epidemiology lab had permission to handle the riskiest biohazards despite the US government having voiced concerns earlier about the lab's safety. I have no idea what the origin was, but those points sounded convincing. I would need to read more about the wet market theory to better compare the two.

    From the book, it looks like Trump had two major problems in the Covid response. One was that he was desperate to make a deal with China so that he would have a major diplomatic achievement for an election year. This delayed the necessary response and kept travel open with China longer than it should have gone on. And the second was an inability to empathize with others while obsessing over polling and reelection. This made Trump unconcerned about the virus itself, and more concerned with making sure it was all hidden from sight. The result was that Trump suppressed testing in the early, critical days, and even stupidly told the press that he was doing so. Moreover, in June, the White House objected to increases in CDC funding and even transferred $300 million from the CDC to the public affairs office of the Department of Health and Human Services for a public relations campaign to "defeat despair and inspire hope."

George Floyd/Black Lives Matter Protests

    The authors write that when Donald Trump first learned about the killing of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin, he was impacted and empathetic. But things changed pretty quickly. As protests continued and became multi-day events, Trump became obsessed by the thought that he appeared weak. He wanted to be seen as a "law and order" president. He also had lots of advisers urging him to bring down the hammer on protesters, while Secretary of Defense Esper and Chairman Milley of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to cool him down. In one conversation in which Miller told the President that he "had to show strength" because "they're burning the country down," Milley told Miller to "shut the fuck up." Multiple times I was surprised at how Esper and Milley resisted and really even disobeyed Trump. They were very concerned that it would be a political use of the military. Their actions in that summer raise a lot of questions about civil-military relations. But they were dealing with a crazy man. On July 30, Trump would propose delaying the election on Twitter. He tweeted: "With Universal Mail-in Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???"

The 2020 Election and "Stop the Steal"

    Trump did not intend to stop being president after one term. In a similar vein to his refusal to support the Republican candidate if he lost the nomination in 2016, Trump refused to guarantee that he would step down if he lost in a press conference on September 23, 2020.  Republicans in Congress, including Mitch McConnell, felt the need to issue statements saying that they would support the inauguration only of the winner of the election. There was more drama days later. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, and Trump held a large event in the Rose Garden (with almost no masks) on September 26 to nominate Amy Coney Barrett as her successor. The next day, Trump attended a Gold Star event for the families of fallen service members, in which he mingled with many guests and commented to staffers that they were letting too many people get close to him, and that "If they have Covid, I'm definitely going to get it." The next day, Trump was doing debate prep for the debate with Joe Biden the following day. The debate culminated in a moment when Biden called Trump a racist, and Trump refused to condemn the Proud Boys, instead telling them to "stand back and stand by." It turned out that sometime during all of this, Trump got Covid and needed to be taken to the hospital due to low blood oxygen levels. He was able to recover after a few days.

    In the fall, it was becoming clear to many on the Trump campaign that he was going to lose. Most of them blamed Trump himself. If his responses to Covid and the summer protests hadn't been bad enough, he then began an attack on mail-in ballots. Without evidence, Trump alleged that main-in ballots would be the source of mass voter fraud in 2020. The result of his claims was to prove nothing, but to convince his own voters not to bother with mail-in voting. His campaign had a mail-in ballot return rate of 2 to 3 percent when it would normally be in the double digits. Trump tried to focus media attention on his "October Surprise," which was Hunter Biden's laptop, which allegedly contained evidence of Biden's corruption. But the so-called smoking gun was just an email from a Ukrainian adviser to Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, thanking Hunter for "an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together." While that may imply some nefarious conduct, it is hardly a smoking gun, and got little attention outside right-wing circles.

    It seems like Giuliani was a key player in initiating the nonsense that followed the election. First of all, on election night, he kept trying to get access to Trump to tell him his master plan. The master plan consisted of just announcing victory for any close states before results were in. But even Fox called states like Arizona against Trump, and it was clear by the morning after the election that Trump had lost. But Trump and his proxies were pushing the false narrative that he won. On November 14, a rally was held outside the White House opposing the election results, a harbinger of more to come. At that time, Trump's team was bringing dozens of legal cases to challenge vote totals, and losing all of them. At one, Giuliani expressed confusion when asked the legal standard and just said "the usual one." In total, eighty judges of both political parties would go on to reject Trump's legal claims by January 6. 

    Also in mid-November, Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr met and agreed that the results were not going to be overturned and that Republicans would have to accept losing the White House. At the time, there was still hope that Republicans would retain the Senate in the Georgia runoffs (which ended up electing two Democrats). On December 1, Barr did an interview in which he said the same publicly, asserting the truth that "we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election." The Supreme Court, with three justices nominated by Trump and six from Republicans total, denied both of the major elections appeals from Republicans on December 8 and December 11. The dismissals were from the shadow docket, and the cases were not heard. On December 12, there was another major "Stop the Steal" rally in Washington, D.C. At that rally, leader Ali Alexander told demonstrators to be ready to take action and that they should be ready to take the fight up to January 6, when Alabama congressman Mo Brooks planned to object to electoral college certification. Barr resigned his post on December 23, writing a letter praising Trump and telling him that it was just to get out in time for the holidays. He would be happy later to have gotten out when he did. On December 23, Trump called the chief investigator on ballot fraud in Cobb County, a suburb of Atlanta, and began personally pressuring her to find him more votes or cancel "fraudulent" votes for Biden.

    Trump issued a call to action on New Year's Day: "January 6th. See you in D.C." And on January 2, Milley got a heads-up from a former defense secretary that all ten living former secretaries would publish an opinion piece in the Washington Post the next day warning current Pentagon leaders to never allow the military to be used to settle an election dispute or interrupt the peaceful transition of power. Milley said to one of his aides that, "This is a Reichstag moment. The gospel of the Fuhrer." And it wasn't helped that Trump just kept ratcheting up his crazy levels. By this point, Giuliani and other crazies had total access to him. This is something that a competent chief of staff would have prevented, but Mark Meadows was powerless. Trump was going crazy, and on January 2, he called Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's secretary of state, to pressure him to find 11,000 votes. It actually took 18 calls to get through since Raffensperger's office thought they were prank calls. Raffensperger's office recorded the conversation and planned not to release it, but felt their hand was forced by Trump's tweet on January 3 that Raffensperger "was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the 'ballots under the table' scam, ballot destruction, out of state 'voters', dead voters, and more. He has no clue!" It should be mentioned here that Raffensperger is a Republican. On that call, Trump was recorded saying, "All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state... Si what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already." Others in the administration criticized Mark Meadows for scheduling the call. Larry Kudlow said, "Mark, did you think for one minute that that call would not be leaked in its entirety? Are we children here or are we adults?"

    Mitt Romney had already suspected that there would be some kind of violence on January 6. His wife asked him not to fly out, but he was going to do his duty and cast a vote. At the airport on January 5, a woman filming him on her phone confronted Romney, asking "Why aren't you supporting President Trump?" But she wasn't the only one. On the plane, Romney discovered that many of the other passengers were Trump supporters on the way to Washington, and a large group of them directed a "Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!" chant at Romney.

    At 8:17 AM on January 6, Trump tweeted, "States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States. AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!" That day, Trump gave a speech at the Stop the Steal rally, concluding by urging his supporters to march to the Capitol, suggesting he may join them. He said, "Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and that "it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy." He continued, "We're going to walk down to the Capitol and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women...We're going to try to give our Republicans--the weak ones, because the strong ones don't need any of our help--we're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country." It was then that the storming of the Capitol began. 

    Meanwhile, shortly after one PM in the Capitol, the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell was speaking out for certifying the election, against Trump. He said, "The Constitution gives us here in Congress a limited role. We cannot simply declare ourselves a National Board of Elections on steroids. The voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken. They've all spoken. If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever. This election, actually, was not unusually close. Just in recent history, 1976, 2000, and 2004 were all closer than this one. The electoral college margin is almost identical to what it was in 2016. [If] this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We'd never see the whole nation accept an election again. Every four years would be a scramble for power at any cost."

    Within an hour of that speech, rioters were scrambling through Capitol halls, windows, and rooms, ransacking the building. Mike Pence's security team tried to get him to leave, but he absolutely refused. The situation was tense for a few hours, and multiple rioters and a Capitol police officer were killed or died. But things eventually subsided in the afternoon as reinforcements arrived. And at 4:05 PM, Biden delivered remarks from Wilmington, Delaware, condemning the chaos and calling on President Trump to demand an end to the siege. The speech received bipartisan applause when airing to Republicans and Democrats in the Capitol. At 4:17, Trump posted a video on Twitter of him recorded in the Rose Garden. He told his supporters to go home, after two hours of pressuring by his daughter Ivanka, but he also told them, "We love you." He had needed three takes, and the final result was very inconsistent and left lots of room for his supporters to imagine that he really wanted the Capitol to be stormed. Trump tweeted again at 6:01 that "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!" Throughout the entire day, no government or military leaders heard from the president, not even Mike Pence. We can look at that as two things. One, Trump never issued an order to shut down the insurrection. But he also never issued an order to support it either.  

    In the end, six Republican Senators objected to Arizona's votes and seven objected to Pennsylvania's. But in the House, 121 Republicans voted against Arizona's votes and 138 voted against Pennsylvania's. This amounted to about two-thirds of the Republican conference. At 3:24 AM, Congress completed the counting of votes and confirmed Joe Biden's electoral win, and Mike Pence declared him the next president of the United States.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• On August 27, Fauci opened a piece of mail in his office and white powder burst all over his face. Security agents had him stay in his office until a hazmat team arrived and stripped him naked before bringing him to a separate room at NIH where he was sprayed with a decontaminating chemical. 
• On September 15, Trump completed the Abraham Accords, in which Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates normalized relations. They were united in opposition to Iran, which helped smooth relations.
• For Trump's debate sessions, his aides told Rudy Giuliani to show up two hours later than when they were scheduled to start because they respected him so little and thought he would be a distraction.