Evicted, Matthew Desmond, 2016

 Evicted is a fantastic book - it’s well written and highly enlightening. The author, Matthew Desmond, describes people and places as if he were writing a novel, meaning one can read and enjoy like one would popular fiction but also come away benefiting from the deeply researched and educational content on this serious matter. It has three parts; the main body of the work, a policy proposal epilogue, and a final self-reflection on the technical details of the project.

The majority of the book, as mentioned, is written almost with a story-like narrative recounting the difficult housing and life journeys of several different figures across the city of Minneapolis after the Financial Crisis and Recession of 2008. Interspersed are more directly informative sections. Desmond follows several very poor people, Black and White, with no housing security and a couple landlords specializing in urban poverty housing.

Particularly unique is the story of Sherrena, a Black woman landlord who along with her husband Quentin runs several dozen ramshackle houses and apartments throughout the Black ghettos of Minneapolis. Desmond builds a convincing case for the historical intentional creation and continuation of Black ghettos in American cities through formalized or customary practices. Make no mistake about it, these segregated housing systems are nowhere near resolved and remain a serious civil rights issue. But Sherrena serves as a powerful magnifying glass to the profitable business of ghetto housing. We learn through Sherrena’s entrepreneurial wheelings how evictions, lack of maintenance, and manipulation of programs like housing subsidies either do harm as designed or do little of the intended good to the people, but are powerful profit-generating tools. Sherrena’s demographic identity also serves to show the extent of segregation in the twenty-first century - at a landlord meeting, Sherrena is approached by many White landlords, who know about the business opportunities of the poor Black neighborhoods but are too personally afraid to go there, where she can offer to act as a property manager since she is Black and able or willing to work there.

Next, the epilogue is where Desmond breaks the narrative form and speaks directly to the importance of improving and removing the realities he witnessed and reported. He argues that the existing poverty housing system is the result of many historical processes and in many ways is not an accident but rather the result of a string of policy decisions. Even today, the federal government spends huge sums to subsidize suburban living through tax breaks. This is evidence of the ability that the government has to spend real money to combat the problems Desmond vividly exposes. His proposed solution is a much-expanded and reform nationwide voucher system, which depending on the implementation, could benefit tenants and even landlords seeking a reasonable rate of return.

Finally, the “About this Project” section explains how the author follows the methods and standards of ethnographic research. Desmond himself lived in the world described in the book for some time. The people in the book are all real, although renamed. He meditates on the nature of being an observer to terrible circumstances and wonders about whether he should intervene or not. He also explains his writing style and the choice to remove himself from the narrative.

The book deals primarily with eviction both as a symptom of self-reinforcing systematic poverty and as a root cause of the same. The book serves as a holistic description of American urban poverty. The reader is always brought back to the issue of housing and lack thereof, but all facets of impoverished American life are addressed. Evicted explains local and federal welfare systems, historical contexts, demographics, and daily lives. Some very edifying sections touched on the opioid epidemic. 

Aside from the important society-level narrative offered in Evicted, the author introduces heart-crushing and at-times unbelievable characterizations of real figures suffering at the very bottom of America’s social hierarchy. Perhaps showing my naivety, I was surprised to read about victims of poverty nearly illiterate, riddled with untreated or undiagnosed mental illnesses and traumas like abuse, who have never worked or supported themselves, and who have been or will be exposed to dangerous drugs from womb to tomb. These sad testaments to failures of our society are cheek to jowl with others less damaged striving to no avail to improve their lot. It’s critical for all Americans to realize that whatever notions they have of this country as “developed” or “rich” are not adequate to explain a place with large pockets of abject suffering. 

Most directly said during Desmond’s epilogue but thematically explored throughout the whole work is the central role of one’s housing accommodations as a cornerstone of life. 

In a time of pandemic living defined by work-from-home, school-from-home, and stay-at-home orders, this importance of the home could not be clearer. But adding insult to injury, many Black and poor people were required to work on-premises and did not have the luxury of staying at home during the pandemic. As for those who do not or can not work and rely on personal interactions with social or case workers, these services were shuttered for months at least.  

There were some housing-related topics that I feel merit further investigation in follow-up reading. For one, while Evicted dives into the impoverished housing systems and markets, the other side of the coin must be addressed more. It would be particularly beneficial to touch on the subsidization of middle-class and high-income housing through single family zoning and the mortgage interest deduction. The epilogue does this in right-sizing the resource requirements for a large-scale affordable-housing subsidization scheme, but I would like to know to what extent the inner city impoverished housing and the suburban housing systems rely on each other to remain as they are. 

There was huge momentum prior to the pandemic to remove single family zoning in an effort to spur the development of more affordable housing. Note that what this means is that single-family houses remain an option in these zones, but so too are several-unit-housing such as duplex or triplex options. In fact, the most famous case of this occurred in nearby Minneapolis. We will have to wait to see the effectiveness of this change.