Is Mayor Buddy Dyer abusing Black people with his double whammy of labor and housing exploitation?
- Details
- Category: Politics
- Published: Thursday, 10 October 2019 18:56
- Written by Lawrence A Robinson
Mayor Dyer's campaign promise to Black people and therefore, the community is to solve the housing issue. He recently announced a $15/hour wage increase for city workers. Wages increase over years and will surely be inadequate by the time it arrives.
Here are some excerpts from a study title, 'How Poor Americans are Exploited by Their Landlords.' The link to that study is at the end of this piece.
Ultimately, they find consistent evidence that the poor, and especially the minority poor, experience the highest rates of housing exploitation. In their most basic formulations, they find that renters in high-poverty neighborhoods experience levels of exploitation that are more than double those of renters in neighborhoods with lower levels of poverty.
The housing-exploitation rate is also higher in majority-black neighborhoods (20 to 25 percent) compared to minority-black neighborhoods (10 to 15 percent).
Landlords in poor neighborhoods derive a median profit of $298 monthly, compared with $225 in middle-class neighborhoods and $250 in affluent ones.
In Milwaukee, the profit differential is even greater, with landlords in poor neighborhoods raking in $319 per month, more than double the profit ($174 per month) of landlords with properties in non-poor neighborhoods.
"If exploitation relies on the exclusion of a disadvantaged group from a productive resource," Desmond and Wilmers write, "that resource is housing located outside of poor neighborhoods." They add, "Renters in poor neighborhoods are excluded from both home ownership and apartments in middle-class communities on account of their poverty, poor credit, eviction, or conviction history, or race (through discrimination)." Ultimately, they conclude, "renters are exposed to exploitation on account of their reliance on housing and their lack of options for securing it."
When all is said and done, the poor suffer not only in the labor market. They suffer again in the rental housing market, paying more of their lower incomes for housing, and facing the double whammy of labor and housing exploitation.