Arleen Beale’s latest eviction began with a snowball fight. It was January of 2008, and Milwaukee was experiencing its snowiest winter on record. Arleen’s son Jori and his cousin were cutting up, packing powder tight and taking aim at the passing cars on Arthur Avenue. One jerked to a stop, and a man jumped out, chasing the boys to Arleen’s apartment, where he broke down the door with a few kicks. When the landlord found out about the property damage, she decided to evict. Arleen had been there with her sons—Jori was thirteen, Jafaris five—for eight months.

The day they had to be out was bitterly cold, but Arleen knew what would happen if she waited any longer to leave. Her first eviction had taken place sixteen years earlier, when she was twenty-two; she figured that she had rented twenty houses since turning eighteen. First, the landlord would summon the sheriff, who would arrive with a gun, a team of movers, and a judge’s order saying that her house was no longer hers. Then Arleen would be given two options: “truck” or “curb.” “Truck” meant that her things would be loaded into an eighteen-footer and checked into bonded storage. She could get everything back after paying three hundred and fifty dollars. Arleen didn’t have the money, so she would have opted for “curb,” which meant that the movers would pile everything onto the sidewalk: mattresses; a floor-model television; her copy of “Don’t Be Afraid to Discipline”; a nice glass dining table and a lace tablecloth; the meat in the freezer.

Arleen was thirty-eight, with pecan-brown skin and world-weary eyes. She had supported her children over the years by working, as well as by relying on welfare. When Jori’s father left her, she had a cleaning job at Mainstay Suites, by the airport. In despair, she quit and began receiving welfare. Later, she found work wiping tables and mopping up spills at the Third Street Pier restaurant, but, after her mother died, she left that job, too.

When Arleen was evicted from her apartment on Arthur Avenue, she was receiving a stipend from Wisconsin Works, a family-aid program—a reduced amount, because she wasn’t working. The sum, in 2008, was the same as when welfare was reformed more than a decade earlier: $20.65 a day, $7,536 a year.

Arleen took her sons to a homeless shelter, where they stayed until April, when she found a house on Nineteenth and Hampton, in the predominantly black inner city, on Milwaukee’s North Side, where she’d grown up. There was often no running water, and Jori had to bucket out what was in the toilet. But Arleen loved that the rent was only five hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, and that the house was set apart from others on the block. “It was quiet,” she remembered. “It was my favorite place.”

After a few weeks, the city found the house “unfit for human habitation.” Arleen moved into a drab apartment complex deeper in the inner city, on Atkinson Avenue, which she soon learned was a haven for drug dealers. She feared for her boys, especially Jori, who was goofy and slack-shouldered and would talk to anyone. They endured four summer months there before their caseworker at Wraparound, a social-services agency, found them a bottom duplex unit on Thirteenth Street and Keefe.

To avoid embarrassment, Arleen and the boys walked their things over to the new place at night, pushing the larger items, like the sun-faded floral-print love seat, on top of a wheeled garbage can. At the house, she held her breath and tried the lights, smiling with relief when they came on. She could live off someone else’s electricity bill for a while. There was a fist-size hole in a living-room window, the front door had to be locked with an ugly wooden plank dropped into metal brackets, and the carpet was filthy, the dirt ground in. But the kitchen was spacious and the living room well lit. Arleen stuffed a piece of clothing into the window hole and hung ivory curtains.

The rent was five hundred and fifty dollars a month, utilities not included—the going rate for a two-bedroom apartment in one of the worst neighborhoods in America’s fourth-poorest city—and would take eighty-eight per cent of Arleen’s six-hundred-and-twenty-eight-dollar-a-month welfare check. Maybe she could make it work, at least through the winter.

There was a knock at the door. It was the landlord, Sherrena Tarver, a short black woman with bobbed hair and freshly done nails, loaded down with groceries. (Names have been changed.) She had spent forty dollars of her own money on the food and picked up the rest at a pantry. She knew Arleen needed it. Arleen thanked Sherrena and closed the door. Things were off to a good start.

Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare enough to draw crowds. Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today. In February, 1932, the Times published an account of community resistance to the eviction of three families in the Bronx, observing, “Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000.”

These days, evictions are too commonplace to attract attention. There are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. Some moving companies specialize in evictions, their crews working all day long, five days a week. Hundreds of data-mining companies sell landlords tenant-screening reports that list past evictions and court filings. Meanwhile, families have watched their incomes stagnate or fall as their housing costs have soared. Today, the majority of poor renting families spend more than half their income on housing, and millions of Americans are evicted every year. In Milwaukee, a city of fewer than a hundred and five thousand renter households, landlords legally evict roughly sixteen thousand adults and children each year. As the real-estate market has recovered in the wake of the foreclosure crisis and the ensuing recession, evictions have only increased.

But there are other ways, cheaper and quicker than a court order, to remove a family. Some landlords pay tenants a couple of hundred dollars to leave by the end of the week. Some take off the front door. Nearly half of the forced moves of renting families in Milwaukee are “informal evictions,” which, like many rentals, involve no paperwork, and take place in the shadow of the law. Between 2009 and 2011, more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were displaced involuntarily, whether by formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation. In 2013, nearly the same proportion of poor renting families nationwide was unable to pay all of their rent, and a similar number thought it was likely that they would be evicted soon.

For decades, social scientists, journalists, and policymakers have focussed on jobs, public assistance, parenting, and mass incarceration as the central problems faced by the American poor, overlooking just how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly everyone has a landlord.