Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Fascinating and infuriating. Reads in a way like a novel - the book follows several families and individuals struggling with housing insecurity and everything that goes along with it. There are single people and families, some with other issues like addiction or criminal history, but all their stories are compelling and I was rooting for all of them to succeed and find a stable place to live. (Except for the one super-racist white guy, but he's a fairly minor character.) The book also looks at the structural faults of the housing system - my only real issue is that I think more time could have been spent on the effects of segregation and redlining, because even the poorest white families profiled in this book have an easier time and end up in better neighborhoods. There are also two landlords who are characters, which is interesting - almost no one is a full-on hero or villain here. I learned a ton by reading this, and I'm someone who works with low-income people on a daily basis in my job. Highly recommended.

This book was pretty good. I had to read it for a journalism class, and it really provided me a different perspective as someone who has almost always lived in suburbia. The stories told are heart breaking because it's of a system d signed to fail people.

There are a lot of characters and things going on, which did make it harder to follow, especially when it would switch from situation to situation and it made reading the book more difficult trying to remember the details of different people and who knew who, ect.

Excellent sociological analysis of life at/below the poverty line in Milwaukee. Glad that Desmond spent time explaining how he did his ethnographic research and his conclusions, as I had lots of questions. Definitely recommended reading for all. By spending time with these people, you viscerally feel the effects of grinding poverty, hopelessness and helplessness, and desperation.

“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.

Desmond used ethnography to create vivid narratives of the lives of people facing eviction and weave in data on eviction and affordable housing crises, explanations of processes and systems and their failings. I have a much better understanding of housing voucher programs, landlords' exploitation, and gaps and holes in our welfare systems through which people fall (I also think my reading was very much helped and contextualized by having read The Color of Law beforehand). My two main gripes here are that a) despite his attempt to remove himself from the narrative, Desmond's writing about the people in the book often feels paternalistic, and b) his ending recommendation for universal voucher systems doesn't fully convince me that such a system wouldn't still be ripe for abuse (by landlords) and leave people behind. To his credit he admits other solutions can and will come and perhaps vouchers are a helpful stopgap.

This book is hard to read. Not because the language is incomprehensible but because the subject matter is difficult. Desmond spent years of his life among people experiencing poverty and came to know individuals who were part of the eviction cycle personally, which is what this book is about. Eye-opening, educational, disturbing—this book is all of these and more.

There are no heroes in this book. In the same way, however, there are also no bad guys.

This is the story of how the drive for profit has ruined lives. We all want families to have a place to live. We all want people to make enough money to provide for their families. We all want people who offer homes for families to make a decent living.

Yet somehow this isn't happening.

Poor people are being forced to pay a huge percentage of their income on a place to live. The housing offered isn't well maintained to begin with. The people who move into the housing know going in they will not have enough money coming in to pay their bills. The people who move into the housing can't get the owners to fix the problems. The tenants don't take care of the housing.

Eventually the tenants are evicted. Children are disrupted. Parents scramble to find money to move and to find a new place to live. The housing is left in terrible condition. The owners must find new people to rent to.

On it goes.

The tenants aren't good guys. They are druggies, alcoholics, unemployed or underemployed, people who have trouble with the law, violent, mean.

The owners aren't good guys. They are people who have grown up poor themselves, but have saved enough to be able to buy and then rent to the desperate underclass. They don't fix problems with the houses, knowing that the tenants typically don't take care of their rent property. They gouge the poor with inflated rent prices.

After reading this book, I feel like I understand much more about poor people and the whole system of renting property. None of it makes me feel good. I don't have any solutions. But all of it seems to be terribly wrong and bad. I hope people wiser than me are working on ways to make this ugly story better.

Through impressive research and composition, Matthew Desmond unveiled the reality of what it means to be trapped in the inescapable poverty-eviction loop rampant in our country. Evicted is an important read — I had no understanding of the role evictions play in poor communities until now, let alone the amount of people affected by them daily. Although this book was devastating, I am very glad to be a little more knowledgeable and much more empathetic to this issue that so many people face.

This book was so revealing, raw, and gripping. This book gives real life proof that racial discrimination is still a huge issue in America, and that landlords in major cities use poor people's desperation to get them to rent run down, dirty, and dysfunctional homes and apartments for twice the actual value of the apartment. This book also reveals the lack of effort or urgency that has been given to the housing issue in this country. Desmond did a great job exposing these issues and giving raw depictions of people dealing with these issues in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Between 2009 and 2011 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters faced involuntary displacement. And these figures are consistent across the US for cities of similar size. Matthew Desmond embedded in a trailer park and an inner city tenement to discover the devastating truth of what happens when individuals spend over 70% of their income on housing. With the spectre of eviction hanging over their heads renters are kept quiet and fail to report abuse or horrendous living conditions. It diminishes their self-worth. They can lose their possessions, their job, their benefits and their children. And each successive eviction digs the hole ever deeper.

Matthew follows the lives of several individuals living at the bottom rung of society as they try to claw their way out from underneath a system that profits on their pain. An incredible work of ethnography Desmond continues to stay involved with his Just ShelterJust initiative.

Very well written book. Easy to follow, jumping from family to family, or person to person, as they track the happenings and the struggles that people face. Very eye opening... especially from someone who lives in Milwaukee, and passes some of the very places called out, oblivious to the challenges the people face, and the cycles that they are stuck in.