A woman moves slowly, looking overcome as she answers the door for the sheriff deputy and moving-crew. A sob breaks through her face as she open the refrigerator and sees the movers have cleaned out everything, even the ice trays. At another eviction, the mother named in the court order had died two months prior. The children had gone on living in the rental by themselves with ratty mattresses and roaches scaling the walls. The landlord changed the locks. No one in the crew knew where the children would go, and they did not ask. A week earlier a man being evicted told the sheriff deputy to give him a minute. Then he shut the door and shot himself in the head.
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Evicted Matthew Desmond paints a compelling portrait of the agonizing human toll eviction exacts. Desmond seasons anecdotes gleaned from living with landlords and tenants in Milwaukee’s low-income neighborhoods with enough data to show he has done his homework, but not too much to risk boring the reader.
Desmond’s non-judgmental approach lends much to his credibility. No zealot labeling good guys and bad guys, he instead writes that landlords are not “so different from the rest of us.” If given the same business “opportunity would any of us price an apartment at half of what it could fetch or simply forgive and forget losing thousands of dollars when the rent checks don’t arrive?” he rhetorically asks. At the same time, he writes candidly about some tenants being their own worst enemies with substance abuse and other issues.
The truth is far more nuanced than blaming some tenants for their own plight. Desmond argues that housing affordability and the resulting high eviction rate has gotten worse over several decades because of a complex web of public policies and socio-economic trends.
He shows how low-income people are at great risk of falling into a vicious cycle. If half or more of your income goes to housing, it is easy to fall behind—often for reasons that are not blameworthy at all. Once your behind if you find yourself under threat of eviction and take off from work to look for new housing, you lose income and are at greater risk of being fired. Displaced children fall behind in school and suffer emotional trauma, putting them in jeopardy of falling into a generational poverty trap. And so it goes.
So, do we reach for a Bolshevik abolishment of private rental housing? Hardly. Desmond recognizes that economic incentives to provide housing are a vital part of any solution. “If we are going to house most low-income families in the private rental market, then that market must remain profitable,” Desmond writes. Quoting a source from some 125 years ago, Desmond postulates “The business of housing the poor, if it to amount to anything, must be a business…As a charity, pastime, or fad, it will miserably fail, always and everywhere.”
He urges solutions such as no-cost legal representation for low-income tenants facing eviction, and universal housing vouchers to all who financially qualify, rather then putting most low-income applicants on a waiting list for housing vouchers as is done now. We do not put people on a waiting list for food stamps, nor do we vilify grocery stores for not handing out free food to the hungry.
Rather than display a partisan’s intransigence, Desmond acknowledges that the policies he advocates—like all policies—may have both pros and cons, and welcomes an honest debate. “Would a universal housing program be a disincentive to work? It is a fair and important question.”
Yet not addressing the housing crises, he urges, is far worse than possible side effects of universal housing vouchers and other possible solutions.
A compelling read, Evicted is the product of years of embedded research. The Gates Foundation has granted Matthew Desmond funds to continue research into the causes of high housing costs, even if lower-income areas. Could a sequel be in the works?