8. Harvey Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 70.
9. This finding is based on an ordered logistic regression model applied to the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, 2009–2011. The outcome variable is political capacity. Respondents were asked: “How likely is it that people in this neighborhood would ever organize and work together to improve their community and their lives: not at all, a little bit, somewhat, quite a bit, or a great deal?” The primarily explanatory variable is a measure of perceived neighborhood trauma. Respondents were asked: “While you have been living in this neighborhood, have any of your neighbors ever: (a) been evicted; (b) been in prison; (c) been in an abusive relationship; (d) been addicted to drugs; (e) had their children taken away by social services; (f) had a close family member or friend murdered?” Answers were summed. The full model documents a significant negative relationship between political capacity and perceived neighborhood trauma, controlling for prior political involvement, tenure in neighborhood, neighborhood poverty and crime rates, and a run of demographic factors. See Matthew Desmond and Adam Travis, “Perceived Neighborhood Trauma and Political Capacity,” unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, 2015. On the perception of social disorder mattering more than disorder itself, see Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager, “Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (2001): 717–67; Robert Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
10. During the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, respondents were asked: “What two words would best describe your landlord?” Two independent coders assigned a value to each word, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. Words like “slumlord” and “asshole” were assigned 1’s and words like “excellent” and “loving” were assigned 10’s. More muted critiques or compliments were assigned a midrange value. The coders’ scores were then averaged to produce an overall rating. The average renter in Milwaukee, according to this ranking, sees her or his landlord as a 6. Renters with extreme housing burden did not rate their landlord better or worse than other renters did. But those who experienced housing problems saw their landlord in a significantly more negative light.
11. Tenants did bind together upon learning that the trailer park might be shut down; this was their “extraordinary moment.” But after that moment passed, things went back to normal. They did not question the rent, fight for better housing conditions, or assign a political narrative to evictions. Their quibble had been with their alderman, not their landlord. Once, tenants did circulate a petition. It asked for the removal of a woman seen as a snitch and general troublemaker. “We are asking that Grace in trailer S12 be evicted from the trailer park before matters get worse…” the petition read. “We feel the only way to resolve this problem is to remove her before someone resolves it, and we don’t need for it to come to that.” Forty people signed what came to be known as the Petition Against Grace.
15. A NUISANCE
1. Psychologists have shown that when self-preservation is pitted against empathy, empathy usually loses. See Keith Campbell et al., “Responding to Major Threats to Self-Esteem: A Preliminary, Narrative Study of Ego-Shock,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 22 (2003): 79–96.
2. “Dot your eyes” means blacken them. “Scary,” when used in this way, means cowardly.
3. Throughout the twentieth century, as America modernized and its police force grew, citizens were instructed to clear the scene, to line up behind the yellow tape. The right to pursue and punish wrongdoers would come to rest with the state alone. But in the 1960s antiwar protesters began bleeding from standard-issue batons, citizens were speaking out against police brutality in minority communities, stories of entrenched corruption were being broadcast, Watts was burning, and violent crime was increasing. Facing this gust of changes, Americans began growing disenchanted with the criminal justice system. The coup de grace was delivered in 1974 when Robert Martinson reviewed 231 relevant studies and concluded in the pages of The Public Interest that “with few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.” “Nothing works,” politicians and criminologists sighed. Its authority compromised, the justice system responded schizophrenically, at once giving the police more power and resources while also bringing non-police actors into the business of crime control. On the rise and character of third-party policing, see Matthew Desmond and Nicol Valdez, “Unpolicing the Urban Poor: Consequences of Third Party Policing on Inner-City Women,” American Sociological Review 78 (2013): 117–41; David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Lorraine Mazerolle and Janet Ransley, Third Party Policing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
4. Reinier Kraakman, “Gatekeepers: The Anatomy of a Third-Party Enforcement Strategy,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 2 (1986): 53–104.
5. Desmond and Valdez, “Unpolicing the Urban Poor,” Table S1. Mazerolle and Ransley, Third Party Policing.
6. The nuisance ordinance has also been championed as an effective weapon in the drug war. But of the 1,666 nuisance activities listed in all citations distributed in Milwaukee between 2008 and 2009, only 4 percent involved drug-related crimes. For the methodology that resulted in this estimate, see Desmond and Valdez, “Unpolicing the Urban Poor,” 122–25.
7. Here, “black/white neighborhoods” refer to census block groups in which at least two-thirds of residents are black/white. And “properties that could have received a nuisance citation” refer to those from which three or more 911 calls were placed within a thirty-day period. If most nuisance citations were addressed to properties in predominantly black neighborhoods, this was not so much because those neighborhoods were more crime-ridden as much as it was because they were blacker. The discrepancy remained even after controlling for crime rate, 911-call volume, neighborhood poverty, and other relevant factors. Imagine that two women called the police at the same time, both reporting domestic abuse. One woman lived in an 80 percent black neighborhood and one lived in a 20 percent black neighborhood. The landlord of the first woman was over 3.5 times more likely to receive a nuisance citation, even after controlling for the prevalence of domestic-violence calls made from properties and a neighborhood’s domestic violence rate. Desmond and Valdez, “Unpolicing the Urban Poor.”
8. This might lead one to wonder if recent declines in domestic violence should be credited to the increasing criminalization of family abuse or to the proliferation of nuisance property ordinances that discourage reporting. See Cari Fais, “Denying Access to Justice: The Cost of Applying Chronic Nuisance Laws to Domestic Violence,” Columbia Law Review 108 (2008): 1181–225.