Reviews with content warning for Death - Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Harrowing, heartbreaking, and overwhelming. i have little experience with poverty in America, and this book was eye opening and revolting and just sad. I felt disgusted and horrified.

This book put faces and stories to my eviction data work in a way that is missing in our report tbh.

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just_one_more_paige's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

This backlist nonfiction has been on my TBR for awhile, so when I saw it as a used bookstore, I grabbed it! And having gotten to it just now is great timing, since Desmon just this year has a new publication (Poverty, by America) that it seems, at least to me, to expand on some of the research and ideas from this first book. So I am happy to have had the chance to read this one first. And I hope to pick up Poverty, sooner rather than later, as Desmond's reframing of the realities of housing instability and poverty felt insightful and useful and importantly new, so I'm very interested in the next steps he takes. But let me start by reviewing Evicted.

In Evicted, Desmond follows a few families, all residents of Milwaukee, as they face myriad challenges related to finding stable housing. The complexities of their families and relationships, mental health and traumas, community violence, parenting struggles, financial barriers, and legal/bureaucratic nuances are all intertwined in a way that highlights not just their entanglement with housing (and the prevailing perspective that those issues cause eviction/houselessness), but flips the script to suggest not only that maybe we have some of the cause and effect backwards, but that having stable housing would actually ameliorate many of the aforementioned issues as well.

Honestly, this was tough to read in many ways. Desmond is clear and graphic, though never gratuitous, in his descriptions of the living conditions and daily challenges of the families he interviewed and followed. It's heartrending. He does not hold back on how terrible some realities are, and the way that there are very few resources to help people break the cycle of poverty and eviction once it has begun. And that aspect is even harder to read because he also doesn't hold back on how much of it is unnecessary - a purposeful manipulation and exploitation of the poor to keep the middle and upper classes in the "style to which they have become accustomed." I was deeply unaware that there is significantly more money made on landlording in poor areas than there is in more well-off areas, and while I'm saddened to say that doesn't surprise me as much as one would hope, it's also enraging to see it spelled out like Desmond does. The many ways that *so much* money is made on evictions (like moving companies, sub-prime loans/mortgages, storage units), purposefully (and like, pretending that's not what is happening) is gross. And just really, in general, this system is so effed up. There’s no incentive for landlords to make things easier on tenants (in fact, it often costs them a lot to do so) or vice versa (like taking care of the place you’re living in or asking for repairs that might get you kicked out instead of get things fixed), and every move made by a landlord for their own financial benefit screws over a tenant. And there’s like, nothing being done anywhere to fix this clearly broken system (fixes that would legitimately benefit almost everyone involved). Plus honestly, in general, the arbitrariness of enforcing eviction is ridiculous (yet another example of how the system is broken and senseless) and it really calls out all the condescension and complaints so many make about the people who “game the system,” because this book did nothing if not show how impossible that actually is, even if someone wanted to, because of how complicated and unpredictable it all is.

There were numerous other moments while reading that I jotted down impressions, things that especially surprised or moved me, or for whatever reason stuck out just a little more than the rest. I have no real rhyme or reason to those notes, other than there being something about them that made me take extra notice. I think I'm just going to combine all those reactions or occasions here, for "brevity's" sake. The way eviction has evolved to be used to do what other social services should be there for (like “dealing with” domestic violence situations and other “nuisance” 911 calls) is infuriating, especially because of the way it inordinately affects women and even further women of color. Like, how does forcing someone to choose between help from police/eviction and keeping a home but continuing to experience abuse address anything?! Obviously, it does not. And obviously helping people is not even close to the goal. The exploration of riding under the radar, remaining in substandard conditions instead of complaining, because calling for maintenance could lead to inspections with could lead to condemnation of the building and eviction or losing care of one's children to CPS for conditions at least in part outside of one's control - and those inhumane conditions are better than homelessness or splitting up your family - was excruciating to read. Again, there are no good/viable choices available! Along these same "choice" lines, I also really appreciated Desmond breaking down the concept of choosing to spend “unwisely” in order to “live in color.” This is a common accusation I hear, that people who receive governmental financial support aren't able to break out of that need because they're making bad decisions about how they spend that money. But Desmond shows clearly how, since many people have resigned themselves to a situation that it’s impossible to see a way out of (after they, in most cases, have tried very hard to do so), they take control and create agency in the only way they can figure: to try to live on their own terms. This was a very affecting portrayal to read and I do wish it was a psychological concept more widely addressed/understood.

The look at how the sexes handled eviction notices differently (confrontational versus avoidance: going straight to the source/landlord to request deals and working off debt with small tasks versus approaching nonprofits and family that might not come through or approaching landlords but having to pay rent off with sexual favors) is fascinating and a frustrating reminder of the powerful roots of patriarchy. The extra nudge here, that men can more easily "escape" seeing their failures of poverty, the way they "let their families down over and over," reflected because they can leave a family and kids behind in a way that women cannot necessarily, adds a further layer to the unequal effects of poverty and houselessness. And this is without even taking any exploratory steps into looking at how transgender or other gender non-conforming people may experience even further inequalities on this front. I learned a lot about the social and legal history of housing in the US from reading this book, like the development of property management as a business/primary job and the regulations for what qualifies as allowable housing options. And I would be interested to see how any of this has (or has not really) changed since this was written and in this "post" COVID time. Good grief the racism separating people whose circumstances should unite them is a gross and tragic byproduct of very purposeful separation (I recommend The Sum of Us if you want to read more on this specifically). There are a lot of tough moments watching the intergenerational transmission of poverty, as these characters raise their children as best they can, but pass on the trauma even if they don’t mean/want to. And really just, again, the excessive hoops of poverty (to try and get public assistance that there isn’t enough of anyways) are truly unbelievable to see combined and spelled out in one place like this.

I really appreciated the final two chapters, where Desmond moves past the individual stories he highlights here in this book to talk a bit about the larger picture, his own research, and his suggestions for how we as a nation can address and ameliorate these conditions of housing distress and poverty. Reading Desmond's recounting of his process and research - and how open he is about what his personal identity made possible/impossible throughout was an important set of notes to include. And it was stunning how much of this research didn’t exist until this project, when Desmond had to do it himself after realizing it was nowhere to be found. What an important labor he has undertaken here.

Desmond also finished by philosophically and psychologically exploring the meaning of home, of having one (and a stable one at that) as a cornerstone of a healthy and successful life (and vice versa). The substandard living conditions of dangerous neighborhoods and housing that the subjects in this book experience send clear, constant messages about where society says they belong. And there is no getting around the major psychological effects there (which again Desmond highlights to spectacular effect). The importance of home as a centerpiece of identity and community and personhood is something we all have experience with and can agree on, if we take a moment to consider it, and thus we must also recognize that its lack takes so much from us (not to mention the time and money spent to regain it that could be better and more productively used elsewhere).

I mentioned this right at the beginning of the review, and I will bring us back around to it here at the end because, at least for me, this was one of the primary points (arguments, really) at the center of Desmond's work. The reframing of eviction as a cause of poverty (due to all the trickle down effects of its happening), not a consequence of it, was a massive perspective shift that I think, if it could be made at a policy/population level, would make all the difference. This was an eye-opening, demanding, and formidable work of nonfiction.

“When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice, full of ‘all sorts of shipwrecked humanity,’ they lost confidence in its political capacity. Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma – believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addition, and other harrowing events – were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives. This lack of faith had less to do with their neighborhood’s actual poverty and crime rates than with the level of concentrated suffering their perceived around them. A community that saw so clearly its own pain had a difficult time also sensing its potential.”

“But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality.”

“The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets. We say that at home, we can ‘be ourselves.’ Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home we remove our masks. The home is the wellspring of personhood. It is where our identity takes root and blossoms, where as children, we imagine, play, and question, and as adolescents we retreat and try. As we grow older, we hope to settle into a place to raise a family or pursue work. When we try to understand ourselves, we often begin by considering the kind of home in which we were raised.”

“The persistence and brutality of American poverty can be disheartening, leaving us cynical about solutions. But […] a good home can serve as the sturdiest of footholds. When people have a place to live, they become better parents, workers, and citizens.”

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larbster90's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective fast-paced

5.0

One of the best non-fiction books I've read. Tells the story of eviction not just with numbers, but with human stories.

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lily1304's review against another edition

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informative sad medium-paced

4.5

Honestly this was a brilliant ethnography - people don't take sociology seriously as a field of research, but this is an example of why they should! Personal stories hit home more than impersonal statistics, but Desmond cites plenty of research too to back up the stories he records.

Do not skip the epilogue and afterword about his research methods!

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edie_reads's review

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challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

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julesapollo's review against another edition

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dark relaxing fast-paced

5.0

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sherbertwells's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.0

“We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.” (5)

Evicted by Matthew Desmond challenged my biases.

Not my biases about poverty; it pretty much confirmed my perspective there. Landlords buy properties, neglect them and take advantage of racialized poverty to fatten their own pockets. Poor women, especially single mothers, face a nigh-impossible struggle to build a stable home. Neighborhoods and the availability of housing can improve or destabilize a person’s life.

I believed these things before reading Evicted and Desmond’s extensive footnotes didn’t contradict them. The bias that Evicted overturned was a subtle parasite that I didn’t know had made a home in my system: the bias against sociologists.

As the child of an urban historian (one who studies Milwaukee, no less), I was raised believing in the gaslamp of context, the noble, futile quest through years of obfuscation and the sacred darkness of the unknowable. Compared to valiant historians, sociologists seemed to have it easy. If they wanted to do research, they could just step outside and interview their neighbors!

But Desmond’s solid storytelling opened my eyes to the potential of a good sociologist, which he is. Specifically, he’s an ethnologist, one whose front-line research forms the backbone of Evicted. The book follows several families—some living in a trailer park on Milwaukee’s white South Side, others living in predominately-black North Side slums—face eviction during the winter of 2008, when America’s housing crisis led to widespread displacement among low-income households. Their individual journeys paint a portrait of poverty in the 21st century, humanizing a group that wealthy and middle-class readers might otherwise demonize, victimize or otherwise simply ignore.

“People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to” (219).

While the stories of renters like Arleen, Scott and Larraine provide remarkable testimony on the experiences of being poor in America, Desmond’s scholarship is what makes Evicted convincing. The footnotes go on for 79 pages—25% of the length of the actual story—and provide illuminating explanations as well as citations for everything from Carol Stack’s All Our Kin to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Desmond strikes an efficient balance between dramatizing his subjects and demonstrating his scholarly credentials.

But there’s still something missing from Desmond’s work, something whose absence ultimately hurts his argument: history. Desmond insists that Evicted “tells an American story” because its setting is indicative of the condition of many major American cities (5). But in Milwaukee history, city government has played a larger-than-average role in shaping residents' living situations. Desmond concedes that “Milwaukee used to be flush with good jobs” in the early 20th century, but neglects to mention that these conditions were created by a string of Socialist mayors who encouraged labor unions, public works and welfare programs, and who faded from the spotlight in the 1960s as white working-class voters felt threatened by Milwaukee’s growing African-American population. A deeper examination of the history of segregation in Milwaukee would also aid Desmond’s arguments about the differences between white and black renters’ experiences. But it’s also possible that I have not completely overcome my bias against sociologists.

Evicted was my first foray into sociological nonfiction, as I imagine that it was for many of the 66,954 readers who left ratings of the book on Goodreads. It probably won’t be my last. Unlike many ethnologists, Desmond chooses to remove himself from the central narrative; an afterword explains his relationships to the subjects and his role in the events of the story. When documenting an issue as large as America’s problems with urban housing, he claims, “‘I’ don’t matter” (335).

Perhaps that’s a lesson I need to take to heart. Evicted is a good book with a strong message about a big problem, and if it changes American housing for the better, I would feel nothing but pride.

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