Monday night I got to hear Harvard sociologist and MacArthur Genius Matt Desmond present the 33rd Annual Urban Studies lecture.

Awesome.

Two questions I would have asked:

1. This research reveals a key source of the mobility that teachers in city schools have always felt. I’d always assumed that this was about poverty, crappy housing stock, and slumlords, but this book makes clear that the weight of the state stands behind the craplords and, as Desmond said so eloquently, “eviction is a cause, not a condition, of poverty.” I wondered what policies the school district as well as the massive network of charter schools in Milwaukee had adopted to deal with this situation or whether it was another thing teachers would have to deal with. Desmond notes the enormous cost kids pay when the “rent eats first” but I hope an ethnographer on his team is studying the overlap between the affordable housing crisis and challenges in urban education. (For example, I would guess that kids who have more stable housing situations are more likely to be involved in charter schools where managing the admission process requires a kind of stability; similarly, entering (and staying) at at a magnet school would be difficult amidst constant housing change.

When he announced that he was hiring lots of research assistants, I got that crazy project-based teacher feeling and wondered if we could design a project for our students in West Philadelphia to try and take on some piece of this. They could write and conduct their own mini-survey, graph their experiences, and do some interviewing about this issue. Especially if we could use Desmond’s notion that eviction is an issue of “inevitability not personal responsibility” as a way of making clear this is a big issue, not one to feel shame about.

2. I appreciated that Desmond spent so much time with Milwaukee’s landlords and tried to get their side of the story. I got to thinking about my block, where there are 46 structures but only 11 (or so) are owner occupied and only about half are still single family homes, even if they’re rented as group homes. The rest are apartment buildings.

Over the past twenty-two years I see the same story repeated again and again: folks in their late 20s or early 30s, having purchased their own home then use the equity to purchase a second or third rental building. These mini-real estate empire builders cross all racial and ethnic lines but they follow a similar pattern:

* they use craptastic contractors who do quick and dirty work or they do the work themselves,
* they do not pull permits for the work.
* they purchase the home and we see them regularly for the first year or so, then not so much.

There’s all sorts of tax incentives and financial incentives to keep apartments just nice enough to stay full and barely legal. There’s no incentive to contribute to the community of the block especially as it seems as though rent keeps going up.

If we just embrace housing vouchers, don’t we miss the other structures that allow landlords (and slumlords) to keep on keepin’ on? What other ideas might we pursue? I’ve always wanted a tax break for individuals who convert shitty apartments into single family homes, which would work for my block, but might also fuel gentrification.