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

4.0

Ooof, this was a hard read about a topic I knew little about. It was particularly interesting to me because all of the cases are from MKE, and while I’m not super familiar with the area, I was able to recognize many of the areas or places they mentioned.
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I learned that the systems in place don’t seem to be working well for anyone. There’s lots of examples, but here’s one: in MKE, a landlord can be fined if the police are called to their property multiple times by their tenant or because of their tenant. That incentivizes the landlord to evict tenants when that happens, which means when a tenant is in a dangerous situation, the decision between calling the police & not is often a choice between being abused or being evicted. It negatively affects the(most often) women being abused, any children, any neighbors who can hear and are afraid for their neighbors but don’t want to get them evicted, the landlords - when the person at fault is the abuser, often a boyfriend who doesn’t even live there.
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Definitely an informative read - if you’re interested in the topic, you’d enjoy it.