Evicted

I met Matthew Desmond before he became one of the youngest Professors with his own center at Princeton University. He was visiting London, had just published his first book, and was still finishing the research for this book.

Desmond did an enormous amount of field research; he spent months living in a trailer park, on top of thousands of hours in archives and courtrooms where eviction cases are decided. The result is the best book I have ever read about poverty.

What happens when ‘normal people’ get evicted? Desmond’s story is rich and personal, and that is what we need:… show more.

Desmond brilliantly reverses the usual tale – that poverty causes eviction – to show that eviction also causes poverty. 

He tells the stories through families, Black and white, whose lives are upended simply because they missed a housing payment and were thereby evicted. Desmond lived in high poverty neighborhoods during his years researching the book and vividly tells the lives of the people he got to know. He points out how central housing is to whether or not individuals can flourish in America.

Again, I found this book to be heart-breaking. It tells the stories of several very poor families whom the author got to know over a period of a year-plus in Milwaukee in the early part of the 21st century.

It allows you to understand how badly the government and landlords and courts treat them and how miserable their lives are, especially but not only, for the children, who usually live just with the mother and siblings and who continually have to change schools, lose possessions and pets, leave behind friends and go hungry. The poor women struggle masterfully and don’t… show more.

In another Pulitzer winning book, sociologist Matthew Desmond goes deep into the eviction crisis through the eyes of poor families, both Black and white, across the most impoverished areas of Milwaukee.

Desmond’s deep immersion with these families brings you to ground level of an often-hidden system of throwing struggling families out on the street. Evicted makes clear that this practice is not only inhumane, it kicks off a cycle that’s nearly impossible to escape, and makes families much more vulnerable to being separated by the state.

In researching his book, Matthew Desmond lived in several homes of the urban poor in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, both white and African-American.

He graphically depicts how eight low-income families managed the everyday problems of feeding their children, paying the rent, eviction, and violence perpetrated by gangs and criminals.

In this unvarnished account of the lives of poor urban dwellers, Desmond shows how one eviction can create a cascade of problems, making it difficult to rent another apartment and how it contributes to unemployment, school absence, health, undernourishment, depression, and even suicide.

Access to housing is a key factor trapping people in… show more.

There is a reason Ann Patchett called Evicted “among the very best of the social justice books.” In it, Matt Desmond chronicles the painful sagas of eight low-income Milwaukee families who struggle continually to stay housed – some in a trailer park, others in an inner-city neighborhood. He gives us a fly-on-the-wall perspective that includes the hairy balancing act of their landlords. These are real people – adults and children – who are caught up in an endless loop that zig zags from hope to despair and back again. If you read this from the security of a place you… show more.

Matthew Desmond’s 2018 nonfiction Pulitzer Prize masterpiece, Evicted, shows the other side of homelessness—people desperately trying to hold on to their low-income housing and not become homeless. Because of my experience with the homeless crisis, I now understand the devastating, and almost irreversible, trauma a person experiences from living on the streets. Our shelter system does not work well because the homeless do not feel safe. We need more low-income housing options for the poor, and Desmond’s book lays this out in unapologetic detail as he follows the stories of eight people in the lowest level of the housing… show more.

I’d seen in my work over the years how housing costs impact lower-income Americans, like 60 percent of the nation. Rent and the cost of buying a home have risen far faster than wages—this is the number-one issue facing working-class people today. Desmond moved into a trailer park in Milwaukee and was embedded with both renters and a landlord. The publisher had sent me an advance review copy—I get a lot of books sent my way—and I picked it up figuring I’d skim a few pages, then drop it. I was pleasantly surprised. I couldn’t put… show more.

Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton, spent 14 months living in a trailer park and then a rooming house in Milwaukee’s inner city to portray, in unforgettable detail, the struggles of eight families to make their monthly rent, and the searing tragedy of eviction if they could not. Poverty, broken families, disability, addiction, crime, and the relentless march of the court-directed eviction process form the backdrop for these wrenching human stories.

A book that gives a thick description of poverty and rental property in the American city. Its subject is eviction and how people get moved out of their homes in informed yet heartwrenching detail. It is deeply researched work that to gives a voice to those on the sharp edge of economic marginality and social dislocation.