Evicted

"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.

A bit like A Behind the Beautiful Forevers for Milwaukee, this is an outstanding work of journalism and utterly compelling. With honesty and leveled reasoning, Desmond shows the mundane horrors of poverty in America, and his writing so strong I could smell the shit, mold and stagnant water, feel the cold, grey slush in winter and process more sordid scenes than I wanted to see.
There are many characters who are banging their head against a wall: drugs, too many children and it seems, ridiculous financial choices. But the argument that people make poor decisions because they are poor and not that they are poor because they deserve it resonated. I was also horrified to learn about the disturbance orders, and that women are evicted because they are beaten (the cops are called, disturbance recorded, tenants asked to leave). The police are definitely in full swing as compliant apologists for inequities, as is their way.
Yet the pivotal question he raises,” Does everyone have a right to shelter?” is so obvious that no absurdity committed by the characters can argue against it. And the logic is there too-no matter how foolish some of the decisions of the poor might seem, punishing them for their lack of foresight just perpetuates and exacerbates poverty, and costs the taxpayer.
Of course, professional landlords have more than tidy profits, though their jobs, at least for the hands-on landlords, are challenging. The gap between tenants and landlord, however, is unjustifiable, especially considering that many of their tenants do not live in safe conditions with heat and running water.
Community ownership is doubtlessly affected by repeated evictions, which is a strong point in the book. Though I wonder what other factors figure into this, like centralized and underfunded schools, technology. His paean to the home as the center of all stability and growth was deeply moving. I will be ruminating on this book for a while, as it is packed with insight and I appreciate the complexity it adds to my fledgling understanding of poverty in the U.S.

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.

Social problems can seem intractable because they're the result of so many interlocking social factors and public policies that it's tough to know what to address first. "Evicted" illuminates this by doing a fantastic job of tracing the individual stories of a large cast of real-world characters and relating how they interact and the (sometimes flawed) thinking behind the decisions they make.

The author doesn't cast blame on any one group, but rather looks non-judgmentally at the motivations of everyone involved: landlords who often try to cut tenants a break but are managing their own expenses, tenants who are trying to make ends meet but find themselves dealing with unexpected complications, social workers running programs like addiction treatment that don't come close to meeting demand, and sheriff's deputies who try to be compassionate as they carry out their duties. At the same time, he doesn't absolve certain individuals who make terrible decisions and others who try to profit off other people's misery.

On the whole, however, most are portrayed as good people just trying to get by, trapped in the cycle of poverty that evictions tend to make even more unbreakable. He also delves into that mechanism by describing the consequences of evictions (loss of government benefits, inability to access tenant legal protections like building codes, etc.) that help perpetuate the cycle. Particularly notable is the evident impact on the kids, constantly forced to switch schools with each move consequently forcing them ever further behind their classmates. As the author puts it, eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty -- and he does an excellent job of laying out why. The book concludes with some proposed solutions, and a reason for optimism if we have the will to implement them.

“There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land,” Matthew Desmond writes in the conclusion of his powerful and well researched book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

The Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond follows the intertwined fortunes of eight low-income families in the deindustrialised middle-sized city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Their main characteristic is poverty and what holds them back, Desmond argues, is rent. According to Michael Stone, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, “shelter poverty” is defined as the denial of a universal human need. It describes the condition of people who spent so much on housing that they have to cut back on other necessities, such as food and health care. It is a condition that drag those who lack the skills and smarts to fit the 21st-century economy, down.

As Desmond shows, the main victims of eviction are women. They earn less than men for doing the same job. But the main reason is that women bear all the costs and burdens raising their children as single mothers. Although some of them get some help from their children fathers, in most cases they are emotionally abused women that get only trouble from men who are abusive, addicted or in prison.

A powerful, vivid and important book.