Yikes! Good thing Tenant Resource Center just opened an office there . . . but we only have one year of funding . . . Info for those being evicted is here. Milwaukee phone number is 1-414-431-7337. Or you can email at asktrc@tenantresourcecenter.org
Here’s the highlights of the details from the press release . . .
– 1 in 20 Milwaukee Renter-Occupied Households evicted each year, based on an analysis of court records and a year’s worth of sociology fieldwork from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
– 1 in 10 are evicted each year in neighborhoods in which the majority of residents are black.
– The hardest hit are women and their children, whose lives are severely disrupted by such mobility. Eviction, in fact, can be thought of as the feminine equivalent to incarceration, Desmond says.
– Nearly 60 percent of the 50,538 tenants evicted in Milwaukee County between 2003 and 2007 were female.
– The odds of a woman being evicted in black neighborhoods is twice that of men. It’s not like that in white neighborhoods.
– In neighborhoods in which the majority of residents are black, 18,247 women were evicted in those five years, compared with 9,703 men.
– In white neighborhoods, 7,941 women and 8,246 men were evicted in the same time period;
– In Hispanic areas, 3,139 women and 2,205 men were evicted.
– Women are also overrepresented among leaseholders and it’s impossible to tell from court records whether a woman who was evicted had children, siblings or a romantic partner living with her at the time. This means that his findings are still quite conservative.
– Each year, between 2003 and 2007, landlords evicted an average of 8,479 households a year, or about 5 percent of all occupied rental units in Milwaukee each year.
– The average eviction rate in predominantly black neighborhoods was 9.3 percent, compared with 5.3 percent in Hispanic neighborhoods and 2.7 percent in white neighborhoods.
– Fair market rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee was $665 in 2008, essentially equal to the $673 monthly stipend for participants in the Wisconsin Works (W-2) welfare-to-work program.
– Evictions have accelerated slightly in the Milwaukee area since the start of the national economic crisis as the rental housing market is flooded with tenants who formerly owned their own homes.
CONTACT: Matt Desmond, 608-335-3101, msdesmond@wisc.edu
Desmond is continuing his work on eviction and the reproduction of urban poverty. He is the principal investigator of the Milwaukee Area Renters Study (MARS), a random-sample survey conducted through the UW Survey Center that asks tenants living in poor neighborhoods about their housing conditions, communities, social networks and eviction history. The survey will collect information on the causes and consequences of eviction and hopefully will serve as a new data source from which researchers interested in urban poverty will draw.
Desmond’s research is funded by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, UW-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and the Ford Foundation.
