“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.