Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Not sure if I'd recommend reading this book in one sitting like I did, but it's a hard-hitting, excellent read. Add this to your arsenal of books on social justice along with Just Mercy and The New Jim Crow.

feedback loop of poverty

or

“SAD!”

-read the notes
–the movie “99 Homes” is a good companion (if a bit melodramatic)

A genuine masterpiece of ethnographic non-fiction. Full of devastating details of the injustices of the American housing market and full of heart in telling stories of the real people whose lives are derailed (sometimes permanently) by eviction.

Some of the more shocking things I learned included:
• 1 in 5 renting families pay more than half their income in rent
• 90% of landlords have lawyers in eviction court, though 90% of tenants do not
• It was (at least when the book was published) the policy of the Milwaukee PD to insist that landlords “abate nuisances” caused by 9-1-1 calls about domestic violence (and other crimes) by evicting their tenants. The predictable result is that women under-report abuse because those that do report get evicted, making them even more dependent on violent men as their housing situation becomes desperate.

This book is hard to read. Not because the language is incomprehensible but because the subject matter is difficult. Desmond spent years of his life among people experiencing poverty and came to know individuals who were part of the eviction cycle personally, which is what this book is about. Eye-opening, educational, disturbing—this book is all of these and more.

Through impressive research and composition, Matthew Desmond unveiled the reality of what it means to be trapped in the inescapable poverty-eviction loop rampant in our country. Evicted is an important read — I had no understanding of the role evictions play in poor communities until now, let alone the amount of people affected by them daily. Although this book was devastating, I am very glad to be a little more knowledgeable and much more empathetic to this issue that so many people face.

Essential reading. A grind, for the most part, but not by any fault of the author. Predictably, the story of eviction is brutal, bleak, unrelenting. Here it's laid out in sharp detail, backed by strong research and presented without sensationalization or sanctimony. The writing is clear and effective, with a few minor exceptions (“the sky was the color of a flat beer”? really?). It works. And it works on you: I had to take multiple breaks just to breathe and get away from the constant parade of systems designed to fail. Hostile bureaucracy, tight-fisted “welfare” programs, the impossible and unending calculus of staying afloat, and simple shit luck, just when you find a rhythm they cut your hours and you're back out. Desmond puts the blame where it belongs, but the policy arguments don't come out much until the end: the stories say it all.

This book was pretty good. I had to read it for a journalism class, and it really provided me a different perspective as someone who has almost always lived in suburbia. The stories told are heart breaking because it's of a system d signed to fail people.

There are a lot of characters and things going on, which did make it harder to follow, especially when it would switch from situation to situation and it made reading the book more difficult trying to remember the details of different people and who knew who, ect.

This book was so revealing, raw, and gripping. This book gives real life proof that racial discrimination is still a huge issue in America, and that landlords in major cities use poor people's desperation to get them to rent run down, dirty, and dysfunctional homes and apartments for twice the actual value of the apartment. This book also reveals the lack of effort or urgency that has been given to the housing issue in this country. Desmond did a great job exposing these issues and giving raw depictions of people dealing with these issues in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Desmond used ethnography to create vivid narratives of the lives of people facing eviction and weave in data on eviction and affordable housing crises, explanations of processes and systems and their failings. I have a much better understanding of housing voucher programs, landlords' exploitation, and gaps and holes in our welfare systems through which people fall (I also think my reading was very much helped and contextualized by having read The Color of Law beforehand). My two main gripes here are that a) despite his attempt to remove himself from the narrative, Desmond's writing about the people in the book often feels paternalistic, and b) his ending recommendation for universal voucher systems doesn't fully convince me that such a system wouldn't still be ripe for abuse (by landlords) and leave people behind. To his credit he admits other solutions can and will come and perhaps vouchers are a helpful stopgap.

“Humans act brutally under brutal conditions.” – Footnote 2 to Chapter 17. Desmond is referring to one incident between two impoverished tenants, but he could just as easily be using this as a tagline for the entire book. Sure, there's some brutality between individuals, but what he exquisitely documents is the obscene, pervasive, crushing brutality of our broken systems in the U.S.

Desmond is a remarkable observer and listener, also a phenomenal writer. He meticulously documents his experiences and findings while also drawing you in to care deeply about his subjects: a fine balance, and he pulls it off with grace – at no small cost to his psyche, as he explains in the afterword. Desmond has a prefrontal cortex as well as a huge heart, traits that can conflict deeply; we are fortunate that he combined them to produce this powerful book.

Please read this book. I know you may not want to, especially today (June 2020) or tomorrow (which will almost certainly be indescribably worse). I know you may feel helpless, because all the suffering he describes is needless and preventable and mostly far removed from your and my life. Please read it because we need to face this, need to be informed, and need to have conversations on how to address it.

You can also find this review on my blog.

Y'all know that meme that's like “Uh, hey guys? Just found out about [bad thing everyone has been aware of for quite some time]. Yikes!” Anyway, that's how I feel about landlords after reading this book. A lot of the people in my leftist circles have been damning landlords for quite some time now and while I didn't love the fact that they profit off of the ubiquitous need for shelter, I just didn't quite get how they were worse than any other staple of capitalism. Now I know.

It was easy to go on about helping “the poor.” Helping a poor person with a name, a face, a history, and many needs, a person whose mistakes and lapses of judgment you have recorded – that was a more trying matter.

Evicted follows two landlords in Milwaukee – Sherrena, who owns many properties in the inner city, and Tobin, who owns a trailer park – as well as several of their tenants. It does so gracefully, interweaving life experiences with research and statistics in a way that makes sense and enhances one's understanding of the topics at hand. Most notable is the cycle of eviction and how impossible it seems to climb out of. There are so many factors at play but Desmond is able to explain them all without losing the reader.

Part of the reason why this works is the narrative format; with concrete real-life examples it is much easier to become invested in wanting to know how the system functions. Marrying the bare facts with personal histories turns a series of numbers into an infuriating and heart-wrenching reading experience. And believe me, you will be infuriated. The entire time I was reading this book, I found myself discussing it with family and friends. Learning the details of the housing system, I was deeply disturbed. I realized more fully how privileged I've been to live the way I've lived.

When people have a place to live, they become better parents, workers, and citizens.

While it's easy to place accountability the landlords, making six figures and taking tropical vacations while throwing tenants out onto the streets, the blame is spread more widely than that. Although don't get me wrong, they do deserve to shoulder plenty of it. They will intentionally refuse to maintain properties of poorer residents, particularly those who owe money. If a resident who owes calls a building inspector, the landlord will often evict them for the trouble – technically illegal, but not if the landlord cites the missing rent as the reason for the eviction. They will charge tenants using housing vouchers well above market value. Technically, the tenant doesn't pay extra out of pocket, but an estimated 588 additional families in Milwaukee could be housed using the surplus money the landlords are charging.

One particular practice I hadn't been aware of was nuisance property ordinances, in which the police departments can penalize landlords for their tenants' behavior – meaning that the more the police are called to a specific property, the more likely they are to fine the landlord. Of course, this practice can have dire consequences for domestic violence victims. Instead of being supported, a battered woman is evicted as a “nuisance.” This leads women to remain silent about their abuse even more often, which could in turn lead to their deaths. Additionally, nuisance property ordinances aren't fairly enforced. In Milwaukee, citations were given to eligible properties in primarily black neighborhoods at over twice the rate they were given in primarily white neighborhoods. Through this, the police have a direct hand in forcing more black residents to be evicted than white residents.

But those solutions depend on how we answer a single question: do we believe that the right to a decent home is part of what it means to be an American?

All that barely scratches the surface of what Desmond has to share. This really is quite an engrossing read, and really educational. I'd like to put some work into researching tenancy laws and practices in my area, both to know my own rights and to lobby for necessary change. My only complaint is that Desmond doesn't leave us much in the way of solutions, but I suppose that could fill an entire second book. He also notes that solutions will likely vary region to region and city to city, so the local context counts for a lot. Overall, I really cannot recommend this book enough. It is quite eye-opening and quite important and I'm so, so glad that I read it.

Eye opening, especially when read with Elizabeth Anderson's philosophy of a free and fair society. One of the most disturbing realizations, in addition to the injustice of eviction, appalling conditions in which landlords leave homes, discrimination against renting to families with children, and the mind-numbing number of catch-22s poor renters find themselves in, is that renters face eviction for calling the police. Arleen gets in trouble with her landlord for calling 911 when her son has an asthma attack. Crystal is evicted after calling the police to report domestic violence in a neighboring apartment. We are not fostering any sense of community, civic pride, or responsibility when people don't have safe homes and the stability to imagine more from their lives and demand more from their neighborhoods.

Desmond makes a strong case for housing as not only a human right, but one central to the American Dream. Too often, we find the poor “unworthy of help,” as Desmond says about Arleen - “You could only say ‘I'm sorry, I can't' so many times before you began to feel worthless, edging closer to a breaking point. So you protected yourself, in a reflexive way, by finding ways to say ‘No, I won't.' I cannot help you. So, I will find you unworthy of help.”

This is an incredibly in depth book about how eviction just destroys people and who exactly it destroys. There is so much in here that seems so obvious, but is also no one wants to talk about. One comment Desmond makes shook me. It was about how black women experience eviction more than any other people in the US. He says something like how black men are being locked up in alarming numbers while black women are being locked out. He discusses how landlords are liable for how many times the police are called to their properties which means that women are either evicted because they were beaten by their partners or women didn't call the police because they are afraid of eviction. Then when women are killed by abusive partners police shrug and say, well they never contacted us for help. It's like this evil conspiracy set up to destroy women. But it's not hidden. It's right out in the open.

This was just so infuriating and left me feeling hopeless. Thinking about how it's such a small misstep, a small emergency that could bring anyone to this point. I read every single word of this book. I wanted to highlight passages and quote them everywhere I could. I want to throw this book at everyone who talks about welfare families. I want everyone to read this book.

Very well written book. Easy to follow, jumping from family to family, or person to person, as they track the happenings and the struggles that people face. Very eye opening... especially from someone who lives in Milwaukee, and passes some of the very places called out, oblivious to the challenges the people face, and the cycles that they are stuck in.

This was a wonderfully written, eye-opening book about a subject that I, shamefully, had never thought about before. The audio was fantastic. This one will stay with me for a long time.

This is a book about the eviction crisis in America. It is an incredibly powerful, but ultimately very sad book. It really brought the stories of the tenants and the landlords to life in a very powerful way. The tenants in this book are all victims of our unwillingness to assist the poor with housing, even though housing costs continue to rise. People were living in places without stoves, refrigerators, heat, etc., because they had no choice. In some cases, even homeless shelters provided better services than one's own apartment.

The system, at least in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is rigged against tenants (and Wisconsin is not alone in this). Very few states have strong protections for tenants. Entire neighborhoods are torn apart by evictions. For some of the people in this book, their lot in life appears to be their own fault (addiction, inability to hold a job, etc), but eviction becomes a vicious cycle. You don't go to work because you're moving, and you lose your job. You lose your job, and you can't pay your rent and you get evicted. Landlords evict people for calling the police because of domestic abuse happening in a nearby apartment, because landlords get cited if the police show up too often at their properties. People lose their welfare benefits because they've moved and remembering to call the welfare office was the last thing on their mind. And then they get evicted. Landlords purposely refuse to repair property because it costs money, and if residents complain, the landlord finds a reason to evict them. In other words, no one wins but the landlords.

This book is incredibly depressing, but incredibly important. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in sociology, or just the plight of the poor in the United States.

Fascinating and infuriating. Reads in a way like a novel - the book follows several families and individuals struggling with housing insecurity and everything that goes along with it. There are single people and families, some with other issues like addiction or criminal history, but all their stories are compelling and I was rooting for all of them to succeed and find a stable place to live. (Except for the one super-racist white guy, but he's a fairly minor character.) The book also looks at the structural faults of the housing system - my only real issue is that I think more time could have been spent on the effects of segregation and redlining, because even the poorest white families profiled in this book have an easier time and end up in better neighborhoods. There are also two landlords who are characters, which is interesting - almost no one is a full-on hero or villain here. I learned a ton by reading this, and I'm someone who works with low-income people on a daily basis in my job. Highly recommended.

Important, unforgettable and devastating. Reads like a novel but it's all too real. Definitely deserved the Pulitzer Prize.

Excellent sociological analysis of life at/below the poverty line in Milwaukee. Glad that Desmond spent time explaining how he did his ethnographic research and his conclusions, as I had lots of questions. Definitely recommended reading for all. By spending time with these people, you viscerally feel the effects of grinding poverty, hopelessness and helplessness, and desperation.

Evicted sheds a unique light on the rental market from both the poor tenant and entrepreneurial landlord perspectives. Desmond dives headfirst into Milwaukee to understand the people and the housing conditions of the cheapest rentals in the white and black sides of town. His storytelling draws you in, and if it wasn't for the occasional statistic, you could easily mistake this as a work of fiction.

Rents in Seattle are soaring and homelessness is on the rise. Although I knew about these issues before reading Evicted, I didn't understand just how difficult it can be for people to make decisions on whether to pay rent, gas, electricity, or grocery bills in a given month. Once one or two payments are missed, it's nearly impossible for people to catch up since rent consumes such a significant portion of their income - paying a security deposit for a new home means something else has to give.

I agree with Desmond's final argument that government subsidies should allow more poor to reach the “spend only 30% of your income on housing” standard we have in America today. This isn't a one-size-fits-all solution, but it's a significant step in delivering basic needs and should improve our society as a whole.

Stunning in its methodology and reportage, Evicted is an important, but depressing, book. Fortunately, the book's Epilogue does offer a way forward and possible solutions to the affordable housing crisis. Unfortunately, I see no chance of progress in this area under the Trump administration.

Between 2009 and 2011 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters faced involuntary displacement. And these figures are consistent across the US for cities of similar size. Matthew Desmond embedded in a trailer park and an inner city tenement to discover the devastating truth of what happens when individuals spend over 70% of their income on housing. With the spectre of eviction hanging over their heads renters are kept quiet and fail to report abuse or horrendous living conditions. It diminishes their self-worth. They can lose their possessions, their job, their benefits and their children. And each successive eviction digs the hole ever deeper.

Matthew follows the lives of several individuals living at the bottom rung of society as they try to claw their way out from underneath a system that profits on their pain. An incredible work of ethnography Desmond continues to stay involved with his Just ShelterJust initiative.

There are no heroes in this book. In the same way, however, there are also no bad guys.

This is the story of how the drive for profit has ruined lives. We all want families to have a place to live. We all want people to make enough money to provide for their families. We all want people who offer homes for families to make a decent living.

Yet somehow this isn't happening.

Poor people are being forced to pay a huge percentage of their income on a place to live. The housing offered isn't well maintained to begin with. The people who move into the housing know going in they will not have enough money coming in to pay their bills. The people who move into the housing can't get the owners to fix the problems. The tenants don't take care of the housing.

Eventually the tenants are evicted. Children are disrupted. Parents scramble to find money to move and to find a new place to live. The housing is left in terrible condition. The owners must find new people to rent to.

On it goes.

The tenants aren't good guys. They are druggies, alcoholics, unemployed or underemployed, people who have trouble with the law, violent, mean.

The owners aren't good guys. They are people who have grown up poor themselves, but have saved enough to be able to buy and then rent to the desperate underclass. They don't fix problems with the houses, knowing that the tenants typically don't take care of their rent property. They gouge the poor with inflated rent prices.

After reading this book, I feel like I understand much more about poor people and the whole system of renting property. None of it makes me feel good. I don't have any solutions. But all of it seems to be terribly wrong and bad. I hope people wiser than me are working on ways to make this ugly story better.