Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

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.