A review by hollydyer328
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

4.5

My grandmother lived in the North side of Milwaukee and I spent a lot of time in that neighborhood as a kid under her care. I don’t think I would ever expect that neighborhood to be profiled in a Pulitzer prize-winning book, especially on the poverty and evictions that satiate this low-income neighborhood, but I’m glad that this was the book to do that. Matthew Desmond takes great care in telling the stories of these individuals living in low-income neighborhoods of Milwaukee, and he does it with such detail, honor and care. These families struggle with eviction and obtaining affordable housing, which pulls them even further into poverty. He raises critical awareness on affordable housing as a basic human right and exposes the ways that landlords and the wealthy exploit the poor for profit. The ending was probably my favorite when he went at it with a searing critique and going into his ethnographic approach with the reporting. My only qualm was it felt difficult to keep tack of the many individual stories throughout.