Suburban Evictions: The face of American poverty is changing
On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: The number of families evicted from their homes in suburbs across the country has been on the rise for years, according to a report from Princeton University's Eviction Lab. USA TODAY Breaking News Reporter Claire Thornton (long-time listeners will recognize her voice as a former host of 5 Things) joins Host James Brown to talk about what's behind the increase.
Show notes:
Suburban tenants are facing more evictions than ever, study shows
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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
James Brown:
Hello and welcome to 5 Things. I'm James Brown. It's Sunday, March 12th, 2023. Go, Bills. Every week, we take an idea or concept and go deep. In this week, we're talking about evictions in a surprising place. Life can get tough quickly. Imagine this scenario, you've lost your job. Often, it's not our fault. Maybe unemployment is enough, maybe it's not. The average American, as you may have heard, can barely pay a surprise $500 bill, let alone replace their income. Add a child or two or three, and things get even tougher. Let's say in this hypothetical worst case scenario, something goes wrong with your car. At one point in my life, I had to spend eight or $900 just to keep my old car running. I could barely afford it at that point, and I've heard plenty of people spending much more at one time. Depending on where you live and what your skills are, most jobs are out of reach without a car, and over time, things could get much worse, especially if you live in the suburbs.
Longtime listeners of 5 Things are in for a treat. One of my predecessors, Claire Thornton, is joining me today. She's a breaking news reporter for USA Today. She wrote about a groundbreaking study that shows that evictions in the suburbs are growing and have been rising for quite some time. Claire Thornton, welcome back to 5 Things.
Claire Thornton:
Hey, James. Hey, 5 Things listeners. It is great to be back on the show.
James Brown:
This is well overdue and I hope to have you on more often.
Claire Thornton:
Me too.
James Brown:
Did this story find you or did you find it?
Claire Thornton:
I have followed the work of sociologist Matthew Desmond, the head of Princeton's Eviction Lab, for years. They have the best data on evictions in the US, and I recently finished reading Evicted, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, that followed families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who faced eviction. I had been in contact with the Eviction Lab since last year and tried to keep abreast of when they were coming out with new data. Folks on USA Today's graphics team were also in the loop, and the Eviction Lab reached out to us, alerting us to this new study, and jumped on the opportunity to cover it. So in that way, the story found me, which was pretty cool.
James Brown:
I bet. What's an eviction anyway? How do you define it?
Claire Thornton:
An eviction is when a landlord, sometimes accompanied by law enforcement, makes a tenant leave a property that the landlord owns, makes a tenant leave their home. In a typical year, landlords file over 3.5 million eviction cases. Not every case leads to an eviction judgment, which is when someone must leave their home, but those 3.5 million eviction cases that happen every year are really scary. And especially if you're forced to leave your home, it's very traumatizing and leads to homelessness and it can just snowball and create a lot of problems for a person's life, particularly economic problems.
Even if a family is lucky enough to find a new place to live in time, they might be moving to a neighborhood of last resort that's more dangerous, where they're going to have to pay even more in rent. They're probably moving into an apartment that was the first to approve their application. Even if they're lucky enough to do that, if they're moving across town, an eviction can trigger them to lose their job, furthering the cycle of poverty.
James Brown:
I could also imagine that being evicted or having to rush to find a new place to live would put a whole lot of taxing on your work and other elements of your life.
Claire Thornton:
Yeah. In Matthew Desmond's book, Evicted, people who he followed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who were kicked out of their apartment, had to search for days, driving around the city, calling phone numbers on every for rent sign they could find, and after missing a couple days of work, sometimes they were let go.
James Brown:
Wow. I mean, that just makes the whole problem worse.
Claire Thornton:
Exactly. Matthew Desmond has written that, "Poverty is problems on top of problems, on top of problems, coalescing to make your life a nightmare."
James Brown:
I bet. I think the assumption about the suburbs is that these are places for the wealthy and at minimum the middle class. That's not always the case, is it?
Claire Thornton:
No. One expert I spoke to for this story, Elizabeth Kneebone, she is an economist at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, she wrote a book on suburban poverty, and she writes that there has always been more diversity in the suburbs. There's always been way more to the suburbs than the husband and wife with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence narrative that we like to tell ourselves. And the suburbs are not just one place, they're multiple municipalities surrounding the same city and suburban municipalities that are right next door to each other. One can be affluent and fit the stereotype, but another can be working class, and the racial demographics can be very different.
James Brown:
That brings me to one of the pieces that I found most interesting about your article on this. You focused a lot on the Cleveland, Ohio, area. Why?
Claire Thornton:
Researchers at the Eviction Lab highlighted Cleveland because more than any other metropolitan area that they looked at, the evictions in Cleveland shifted the most. In the year 2000, suburban evictions made up 43% of the area's total evictions and increased to 55%, more than half, in 2016.
James Brown:
Wow. Is that characteristic of the larger picture that you found as you worked on this piece?
Claire Thornton:
Yeah. So researchers looked at 74 US metropolitan areas, and they found that in 58 of them, in a majority of them, the share of evictions in suburban areas increased while the share of evictions in urban areas closer to downtown held steady.
James Brown:
What do you make of this? Low wages, inflation, are some of the factors. What other ones are there?
Claire Thornton:
I learned that since at least 2010, the majority of poor Americans have lived in suburbs, and it was Elizabeth Kneebone back when she was at the Brookings Institution who found evidence for this. The poor population in suburbs has increased at a much faster rate than the poor population closer to downtown areas. So when we look at this consistent rise in suburban evictions, it's because families who have always lived in suburban municipalities have increasingly struggled to pay rent over the years.
Another reason for these evictions is that gentrification in downtown areas has jacked up rents and displaced low income residents from city centers. They've had to search for more affordable housing by going further out into the suburbs, and low income people are far more likely to face evictions from landlords, people who work minimum wage jobs, people who make, in some states, less than $8 per hour. You just cannot afford rent if you're a minimum wage worker in the US anymore, and that's something that researchers and policymakers going all the way up to Marcia Fudge, the Secretary of HUD, agree on.
James Brown:
Are there any other reasons why someone could be evicted?
Claire Thornton:
Landlords are more likely to evict families with children. As unintuitive as that is, if your kid damages the apartment ---- and that's going to be a repair bill ---- if your kid gets in trouble with the police, or even if your kid just creates a quote, unquote, "Nuisance," for other tenants, in the poorest neighborhoods where the landlords are the most unforgiving, these are common reasons why someone gets evicted, and that holds true in the suburbs now as well. So one of my biggest takeaways from this report is that not only are evictions in urban areas holding steady, but they're increasing in suburbs, which means that the level of insecurity, the level of instability, and the level of housing discrimination that kind of goes hand in hand with evictions, is affecting more people and more geographic areas across the board.
James Brown:
I also wanted to touch on the realities of living in a suburb. You don't have a whole lot of transportation options. It's usually highway or bust, correct?
Claire Thornton:
Yeah. Public transportation is abysmal in the suburbs. That's something that researchers chose to focus on in this report. When they were discussing their findings, they said, "This is a dire situation for people evicted in suburban areas." In more urban areas, in city centers, there are way more resources for rental assistance and housing services that people who've fallen on hard times can access. There's just a higher concentration. But in suburbs, there's far fewer nonprofits and advocacy groups that can help you try to not fall into homelessness, so there's less of them. And then to get to them, you can't take the subway there, it's harder to take the bus there, you have to drive there, and it's just way more taxing to try to fight an eviction, get back on your feet, if you're living in a suburban municipality that's spread out like that.
James Brown:
When I think of most of the discourse around poverty and concentrated poverty, you hear about inner cities and you hear about really rural areas. You don't talk about in the middle.
Claire Thornton:
Yeah. I think that that's something that's just now starting to change.
James Brown:
Claire Thornton, any famous last words?
Claire Thornton:
Rate. Rate the show, like and subscribe. I would love to hear what you guys think of the story. You can look at it online. There are amazing graphics that my colleague Carlie Procell made, just search suburban evictions on usatoday.com. And write a review of this episode on Apple Podcasts, let me know what you guys think.
James Brown:
Claire Thornton, thank you for joining me.
Claire Thornton:
Thank you, James. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
James Brown:
Thanks to Claire Thornton for joining me, and to Shannon Ray Green and Alexis Gustin for their production assistance. Tell us what you think of the show. Review us on your podcast app or send me an email at jabrown@usatday.com or leave me a voicemail at (585) 484-0339. We might have you on the show. For all of us at USA Today, thanks for listening. I'm James Brown, and as always, be well.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Suburban Evictions: The face of American poverty is changing-5 Things Podcast
