2. Cf. Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 63.
Poor housing conditions have been linked to asthma, lead poisoning, respiratory complications, developmental delays, heart disease, and neurological disorders, leading a prominent medical journal to call inadequate housing “a public health crisis.” Even limited exposure to substandard conditions could have lasting health effects, especially on children. On the link between housing and health, see Samiya Bashir, “Home Is Where the Harm Is: Inadequate Housing as a Public Health Crisis,” American Journal of Public Health 92 (2002): 733–38; Gary Evans, Nancy Wells, and Annie Moch, “Housing and Mental Health: A Review of the Evidence and a Methodological and Conceptual Critique,” Journal of Social Issues 59 (2003): 475–500; James Krieger and Donna Higgins, “Housing and Health: Time Again for Public Health Action,” American Journal of Public Health 92 (2002): 758–68; Wayne Morgan et al., “Results of a Home-Based Environmental Intervention Among Urban Children with Asthma,” New England Journal of Medicine 351 (2004): 1068–80; Joshua Sharfstein et al., “Is Child Health at Risk While Families Wait for Housing Vouchers?,” American Journal of Public Health 91 (2001): 1191–92.
3. Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), 476.
4. Robert Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
5. Julie Clark and Ade Kearns, “Housing Improvements, Perceived Housing Quality and Psychosocial Benefits from the Home,” Housing Studies 27 (2012): 915–39; James Dunn and Michael Hayes, “Social Inequality, Population Health, and Housing: A Study of Two Vancouver Neighborhoods,” Social Science and Medicine 51 (2000): 563–87. On “territorial stigmatization,” see Lo?c Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), chapter 6.
22. IF THEY GIVE MOMMA THE PUNISHMENT
1. While living with Patricia, Crystal would tell anyone who asked that she was staying with “her mom.” Presumably, she would give survey researchers the same answer. Our current analytical toolkit, even with all the white-coated words of network analysis, is ill equipped to capture the complexity of relationships in which people like Crystal are enveloped. See Nan Lin, Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mario Small, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2012): 1295–335.
2. I did not personally witness this incident. I reconstructed the scene after multiple interviews with Crystal.
When tenuous but intense relationships between virtual strangers end badly—or violently, as they sometimes do—they foster deep misgivings between peers and neighbors, eroding community and network stability. The memory of having been used or mistreated by a disposable tie encourages people to be suspicious of others. Relying on disposable ties, then, is both a response to and a source of social instability.
Crystal’s cousins and foster sisters were around her age. They could not offer her shelter or much money, but they could fly to her side during a fight.
3. On the presence of Child Protective Services in the lives of poor black families, see Christopher Wildeman and Natalia Emanuel, “Cumulative Risks of Foster Care Placement by Age 18 for U.S. Children, 2000–2011,” PLOS ONE 9 (2014): 1–7; Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
4. In 2010, the New York Times reported that one in every fifty Americans lives in a household with an income consisting only of food stamps. Jason DeParle, “Living on Nothing but Food Stamps,” New York Times, January 2, 2010.
23. THE SERENITY CLUB
1. From Scott’s disciplinary proceedings in front of the Wisconsin Board of Nursing.
2. Consequential and costly policy decisions have been made based on the collective assumption that poor people lack connections to kin and friends who are gainfully employed, college educated, and homeowners. Mixed-income housing is intended to “provide low-income residents with exposure to employment opportunities and social role models.” Neighborhood relocation programs, such as Moving to Opportunity, are designed to connect low-income families to more “prosocial and affluent social networks.” But many poor people have plenty of ties to the upwardly mobile. Roughly 1 in 6 Milwaukee renters lives in a neighborhood with above average disadvantage but is embedded in networks with below average disadvantage. But simply having ties to the middle class is insufficient. Likely because of the popularity of the term “social capital,” researchers tend to think of prosocial connections to important or resource-rich people as something you “have” and that, like money, can be used whenever you’d like. In reality, as Scott’s experience shows, those connections matter only insofar as you are able to activate them. On social programs designed to combat “social isolation,” see US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program: Final Impacts Evaluation (Washington, DC: Office of Policy Development and Research, 2011); US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Mixed-Income Housing and the HOME Program (Washington, DC: Office of Policy Development and Research, 2003). For canonical theories about poverty and community life holding that spatial isolation (residential ghettoization) brings about social isolation (network ghettoization), see William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]); Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). For a detailed analysis of neighborhood and network disadvantage, see Matthew Desmond and Weihua An, “Neighborhood and Network Disadvantage Among Urban Renters,” Sociological Science 2 (2015): 329–50.
3. When he was using, Scott would sometimes call it “self-medicating.” It wasn’t just nurse talk. So many words and phrases exist to help cover over the rotten thing festering at the base of the root. How often, I wonder, is coping mistaken for culture?
4. The psychiatrist asked Scott, “Do you want to go straight to two hundred in Zoloft, or do you want to work up to it?”