Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City By Matthew Desmond

In Evicted, Matthew Desmond follows low income residents through their housing journey in Milwaukee. The book details the challenges facing individuals who struggle to find and qualify for decent housing, and it also showcases the challenges facing landlords who rent to these tenants. 

The book breaks your heart. It follows broken families, and the impact of eviction and poverty on children in these situations is heartbreaking. I appreciated the way the author followed landlords and tenants while providing a brief history of housing policy in the United States. 

The book also illustrated the stark contrast for housing struggles for white residents of Milwaukee versus residents of color. The white residents could stomach living in a trailer park on the south side of the city, but they would do everything in their power to avoid living in inner city housing with more diverse people. 

Desmond contends that eviction policy is one of the least studied and most impactful areas of social and economic policy. Eviction uproots individuals from their neighborhoods, causes them to miss work/lose jobs, forces children to miss school, and many issues related to eviction are settled outside of court by landlords. He also notes the challenges to obtain public housing, and most individuals in poverty struggle to qualify and find subsidized public housing. 

Quotes:

“Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on.”

“Nearly half of all forced moves experienced by renting families in Milwaukee are “ informal evictions ” that take place in the shadow of the law.”

“We have failed to fully appreciate 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 all of them have a landlord.”

“Most poor people in America were like Arleen : they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.”

“If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods , eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up . Poor black women were locked out.”

“The trauma of being forced from your home , the blemish of an eviction record , and the taxing rush to locate a new place to live pushed evicted renters into more depressed and dangerous areas of the city.”