Re: [Marxism] The 21st Century Has Been Hard On US Households | Martin Hart-Landsberg | Reports from the Economic Front

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo wrote 
 



https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2018/08/21/the-21st-century-has-been-hard-on-us-households/

The 21^st Century has not been a good one for most working people in the 
United States.  In fact, for most of this century, real median household 
income has been below its starting value in January 2000.


The chart below 
 
shows real (inflation-adjusted) and nominal (or current dollar) median 
household income over this century.  As we can see, the fall in real 
median household income over most of the first eight years was nothing 
compared to the hit median household income took over the next 8 
years. This record is even more appalling when one considers that the US 
was officially in an economic expansion from November 2001 to December 
2007, and then again from June 2009 to the present.



I'm quoting in what follows from an ethnographer from Princeton whom I 
posted about a while back named Matthew Desmond. His book is entitled 
'Evicted' (2016) Danvers, MA, Crown Publishing Group.


Desmond immersed himself for months in  a run-down trailer park and then 
a multiple dwelling house in inner-city Milwaukee. He gained the 
confidence of the people around him sufficiently to be able to follow 
them closely in the endless hunt for housing after multiple evictions, 
into the small claims rental courts, through the street culture of a 
large city, camped out on the streets with their meager belongings when 
the sheriffs showed up. He documented the ruinous, racking effects of 
the housing crisis as it is experienced by millions in the US.


Here he reports on what he calls, "the only comprehensive estimate of 
the frequency of involuntary displacement from housing among urban centers:"


"... 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced at least one forced move - 
formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building 
condemnation - in the two years prior to being surveyed...nearly half of 
those forced moves (48 percent) were informal evictions: off-the-books 
displacements not processed through a court, as when the landlord pays 
you to leave or hires a couple of heavies to throw you out. Formal 
eviction was less common, constituting 24 percent of forced moves. An 
additional 23 percent were due to landlord foreclosure, with building 
condemnations accounting for the remaining 5 percent.


"In other words, for every eviction executed through the judicial 
process, there are two others executed beyond the purview of the court, 
without any form of due process.  This means that estimates that do not 
account for  informal evictions downplay the crisis in our cities. If 
public attention and resources are a product of how widespread 
policymakers think a problem is, then studies that produce artificially 
low eviction rates are just wrong; they're harmful.


"Some of the most important findings to come out of the Milwaukee Area 
Renters Study have to do with eviction's fallout. The data linked 
eviction to heightened residential instability, substandard housing, and 
even job loss ... evicted mothers suffer from increase material hardship 
as well as poor physical and mental health.


"...I extracted [from eviction court records] all the eviction cases 
that took place in Milwaukee between 2003 and 2013, hundreds of 
thousands of them. According to these official records, each year almost 
half of for mal, court-ordered evictions in Milwaukee take place in 
predominantly black neighborhoods. Within these neighborhoods women are 
more than twice as likely to be evicted as men.


"...the median age of a tenant in Milwaukee's eviction court was 
thirty-three. The youngest was nineteen; the oldest, sixty-nine The 
median monthly household income of tenants in eviction court was $935, 
and the median amount of back rent owed was about that much ... even 
after accounting for how much the tenant owed the landlord - and other 
factors like household income and race - the presence of children in the 
household almost tripled a tenant's odds of receiving an eviction 
judgment. The effect of living with children on receiving an eviction 
judgment was equivalent to falling four months behind in rent.


"This book is based in Milwaukee...{and is] a fairly typical midsize 
metropolitan area with a fairly typical socioeconomic profile ...


"... We need a robust sociology 

[Marxism] The 21st Century Has Been Hard On US Households | Martin Hart-Landsberg | Reports from the Economic Front

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2018/08/21/the-21st-century-has-been-hard-on-us-households/


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