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.

The day Arleen and her boys had to be out was cold. But if she waited any longer, the landlord would summon the sheriff, who would arrive with a gun, a team of boot-footed movers, and a folded judge’s order saying that her house was no longer hers. She would be given two options: truck or curb. “Truck” would mean that her things would be loaded into an eighteen-footer and later checked into bonded storage. She could get everything back after paying $350. Arleen didn’t have $350, so she would have opted for “curb,” which would mean watching the movers pile everything onto the sidewalk. Her mattresses. A floor-model television. Her copy of Don’t Be Afraid to Discipline. Her nice glass dining table and the lace tablecloth that fit just-so. Silk plants. Bibles. The meat cuts in the freezer. The shower curtain. Jafaris’s asthma machine.

As the reader follows Arleen's family and other individuals in this airy tome of current-day problems that are affecting the poor and, actually, the not-so-poor persons in the USA, your eyes will widen and your jaw slacken at the sheer magnitude, complexity and most horrid situation that persons who find themselves on the verge of becoming homeless face, not only in the USA, but nearly everywhere, mainly due to how bad societies treat their poor.I, who am writing this, belong to the middle-class in Sweden. I bask in having been carried by a quite big social-security safety net that's been behind me for the past decades. This, however, is changing. The average time it's taken for a Swedish person who has been evicted from their rented (i.e. not bought and owned) apartment after they haven't paid their rent, is two weeks. This is extremely worrying. People do not talk about this. Things are, clearly, worse in a lot of ways in the USA which is highlighted by Matthew Desmond's powerful book. Here's an example of how evictions were seen less than a century ago:

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

There is nothing special about Milwaukee when it comes to eviction. The numbers are similar in Kansas City, Cleveland, Chicago, and other cities. In 2013, 1 in 8 poor renting families nationwide were unable to pay all of their rent, and a similar number thought it was likely they would be evicted soon. This book is set in Milwaukee, but it tells an American story.

There are so many factors to think of other than finding a living space, for anybody. Here's a simple paragraph on Sherrena, a landlord:

Landlords operated in different neighborhoods, typically clustering their properties in a concentrated area. In the segregated city, this meant that landlords focused on housing certain kinds of people: white ones or black ones, poor families or college students. Sherrena decided to specialize in renting to the black poor.

As racism plays part of a lot of places in US culture, this also generates more problems where segregation and discrimination is rife:

These economic transformations—which were happening in cities across America—devastated Milwaukee’s black workers, half of whom held manufacturing jobs. When plants closed, they tended to close in the inner city, where black Milwaukeeans lived. The black poverty rate rose to 28 percent in 1980. By 1990, it had climbed to 42 percent.

There are many personal stories told throughout the book, not in a sensational way, but seemingly to highlight how often extraordinary things happen to ordinary people:

Lamar paused to take in the scene. Just the previous winter, he had climbed into an abandoned house, high on crack. When the high wore off, he found he couldn’t climb out; his feet had frozen. Lamar kept partying after returning home from the navy. In the mid-1980s, crack hit the streets of Milwaukee, and Lamar started smoking it. He got hooked. His coworkers at Athea knew it because he wouldn’t have cigarette money a couple days after payday. Lamar remembered losing his job and apartment. After that, he took Luke and Eddy to shelters and abandoned houses, tearing up the carpet so they could have a blanket at night. Luke and Eddy’s mother was around back then, but her addiction eventually consumed her, and she gave up her boys. Lamar ate snow during the days he was trapped in the abandoned house. His feet swelled purple and black with frostbite until they looked like rotten fruit. He was delirious when, on the eighth day, he jumped out of an upper-floor window. He would say God threw him out. When he woke up in the hospital, his legs were gone. Except for two brief relapses, he had not smoked crack since.

Just because you may be fortunate enough to have somewhere to live, that's not the end of problems inside of those four walls:

Tenants could trade their dignity and children’s health for a roof over their head.13 Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem.14 More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems—as were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did not.

The horrid, rugged, complacent and even torpid stories of people actually becoming evicted cut to the bone of me:

“Can I have until Wednesday?” she asked. The deputies shook their heads no. She nodded with forced resolve or submission. Dave stepped onto the porch. “Ma’am,” he said, “we can place your things in our truck or on the curb. Which would you prefer?” She opted for the curb. “Curbside service, baby!” Dave hollered back to the crew. Dave stepped into the house and tripped over a Dora the Explorer chair. He reached over an older man sitting at the table and flipped on more lights. The house was warm and smelled of garlic and spices. One of the deputies pointed to the built-in cabinets in the kitchen. “This is the kind of shit I like,” he told his partner. “They don’t make this stuff anymore. Tight.” The woman walked in circles, trying to think of where to begin. She told one of the deputies that she knew she was being foreclosed but that she didn’t know when they were coming. Her attorney had told her that it could be a day, five days, a week, three weeks; she decided to ride it out. She and her three children had been in the house for five years. The year before, she had been talked into refinancing with a subprime loan. Her payments kept going up, jumping from $920 to $1,250 a month, and her hours at Potawatomi Casino were cut back after her maternity leave. Hispanic and African American neighborhoods had been targeted by the subprime lending industry: renters were lured into buying bad mortgages, and homeowners were encouraged to refinance under riskier terms. Then it all came crashing down. Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11 percent reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31 percent of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent.

...and people would do nearly everything to avoid eviction:

Men often avoided eviction by laying concrete, patching roofs, or painting rooms for landlords. But women almost never approached their landlord with a similar offer. Some women—already taxed by child care, welfare requirements, or work obligations—could not spare the time. But many others simply did not conceive of working off the rent as a possibility. When women did approach their landlords with such an offer, it sometimes involved trading sex for rent.

People who look for somewhere to live often found out how this affects not only race, age and money but whether you have children or not:

The cheapest motel Pam could find charged $50 a night. They checked in and started calling friends and relatives, hoping someone would take them in. Two days passed without any luck, and Pam began to worry. “Everybody we knew weren’t answering our phone because they knew we needed a place to stay,” she said. Then Ned lost his part-time construction job. He was fired for the two days of work he missed when helping his family move from the trailer park. Job loss could lead to eviction, but the reverse was also true.

When house hunting a few days earlier, two landlords had turned her away on account of her kids. One had said, “We’re pretty strict here. We don’t allow no loud nothing.” The other had told Pam it was against the law for him to put so many children in a two-bedroom apartment, which was the most Pam and Ned could afford.

In 1980, HUD commissioned a nationwide study to assess the magnitude of the problem and found that only 1 in 4 rental units was available to families without restrictions. Eight years later, Congress finally outlawed housing discrimination against children and families, but as Pam found out, the practice remained widespread. Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.

Yes, if you're a convicted felon, you're basically lost as well:

One day with Vanetta’s boyfriend, the two women sat in a van and watched another pair of women walk into a Blockbuster carrying purses. Someone suggested robbing the women and splitting the money; then all of a sudden, that’s what they were doing. Vanetta’s boyfriend unloaded his gun and handed it to her friend. The friend ran from the van and pointed the pistol at the women. Vanetta followed, collecting their purses. The cops picked them up a few hours later.5 In her confession, Vanetta had said, “I was desperate to pay my bills, and I was nervous and scared and did not want to see my kids in the dark or out on the street.” When she turned eighteen, Vanetta had put her name on the list for public housing. Becoming a convicted felon meant that her chances of ever being approved were almost zero.

All in all, this work could be seen as dystopic, but I simply see it as a matter-of-factly statement of where we are; how we treat those that are the most in need, is really a clear measurement of how well society is doing.The author is clear in his statements, the book as a whole is a magnificent piece of work; I was wondering how he fared from writing it, just as I ventured upon this paragraph where he answered my question:

I am frequently asked how I “handled” this research, by which people mean: How did seeing this level of poverty and suffering affect you, personally? I don’t think people realize how raw and intimate a question this is. So I’ve developed several dishonest responses, which I drop like those smoke bombs magicians use when they want to glide offstage, unseen. The honest answer is that the work was heartbreaking and left me depressed for years. You do learn how to cope from those who are coping. After several people told me, “Stop looking at me like that,” I learned to suppress my shock at traumatic things. I learned to tell a real crisis from mere poverty. I learned that behavior that looks lazy or withdrawn to someone perched far above the poverty line can actually be a pacing technique. People like Crystal or Larraine cannot afford to give all their energy to today’s emergency only to have none left over for tomorrow’s. I saw in the trailer park and inner city resilience and spunk and brilliance. I heard a lot of laughter. But I also saw a lot of pain. Toward the end of my fieldwork, I wrote in my journal, “I feel dirty, collecting these stories and hardships like so many trophies.” The guilt I felt during my fieldwork only intensified after I left. I felt like a phony and like a traitor, ready to confess to some unnamed accusation. I couldn’t help but translate a bottle of wine placed in front of me at a university function or my monthly day-care bill into rent payments or bail money back in Milwaukee. It leaves an impression, this kind of work. Now imagine it’s your life.

Read this, which I think is one of the best non-fiction books that I've come across, which has been released in 2016.