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The book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond analyzes real-life stories of several people during and after the 2007–2009 Great Recession. Desmond lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and either directly or indirectly knew all the characters he describes in the book. Desmond wrote the book to demonstrate the importance of affordable housing and how people’s lives are ruined without a place to call home. He emphasizes that it is important to focus on poverty, not just poor people or poor places. Poverty is a relationship involving poor and rich people, and it is important to understand the process that bound them together in mutual dependence and struggle. According to him, eviction is one such process. He experienced this firsthand when his parent’s home was taken over by a bank.
“Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” by Matthew Desmond
In the book, Desmond describes how powerful landlords and their helpless tenants argued over basic living needs. Introduced as the mother of Patrice and three other children, Doreen was constantly hurt by her landlord’s decisions regarding her family’s housing. When Patrice was evicted from her home, she and her children went to live with Doreen. With more family members living in the house, Doreen had to repeatedly ask Sherrena, her landlord, for help with fixing appliances and plumbing issues in the house. Sherrena didn’t address the issues and claimed that Doreen had broken her rental agreement by allowing Patrice to live with her. Consequently, Doreen got someone else to fix the issues and took that amount out of the rent she paid, but this, in turn, got her an eviction notice. She withheld her rent while she looked for another place to move. Sherrena then reported Doreen’s eviction to a publicly accessible website, which made it much harder for Doreen to find a new place. Unable to find somewhere else to live, Doreen had to accept Sherrena’s stipulations of paying extra rent to avoid being evicted. Sherrena’s behavior demonstrates how she used her power to hurt her tenants.
Desmond suggests poor tenants may know their rights, but don’t act on them because they often lose against their landlords. This represents the dynamic between landlord and tenant in society, because tenants who fall even a bit behind in payment have no power when it comes to civil court. Additionally, the right to an attorney is not protected in civil court. As a result, 90 percent of landlords are represented by lawyers, while 90 percent of tenants are not. As Desmond states, if a tenant has a lawyer, their chances of winning a case increase considerably. However, since most tenants don’t have this option, they often sign bad stipulations that hurt them in the long run. With the right to an attorney in civil court and effective lawyers, tenants would be able to report problems with an apartment without the fear of being evicted. Currently, landlords have all of the power when tenants fall behind on their rent, so landlords can choose not to fix broken appliances in apartments. With some type of system that makes it illegal for landlords to evict tenants without fixing broken items, tenants may be able to live better.
Evictions can have a devastating effect on the children. The story of Arleen’s children demonstrates this very well and shows how multiple evictions and constant moving robs children of the affected families of the chance to create relationships with their friends and family. Parents in such situations view education as a secondary need compared to finding a home. This causes their children to change schools often, hindering their ability to effectively learn and potentially causing them to lose interest and fall behind in school. Desmond states that “[f]amilies who spend more on housing spend less on their children.” Many such families have no stability and end up living on dangerous streets, not really providing their children a “home.”
Additionally, the stories in the book demonstrate that usually food stamps and welfare aren’t enough to cover rent and other expenses. Many families spend close to 90 percent of their welfare check on just their rent, which leaves them with very little money to spend on anything else. Some ways to help fix this situation would be to have more affordable housing and more benefits for single parents making less than a certain amount of income. Having a home is important for nurturing children and helping them succeed. Additionally, children without homes could be given benefits from the school system, such as helping transition between schools or helping with meals.
In the epilogue, Desmond defines home as a place that is the center of a person’s life and has always represented more than just brick and mortar since the beginning of human civilization. Home is an aspect of community and a crucial building block of one’s life. Evictions can cause all of these tenets to quickly disappear. Without a place to call home, people’s lives begin to disintegrate. Desmond describes how the 2007–2009 recession forced Vanetta to take a pay cut in order to keep her job. Due to her loss of income, she couldn’t pay for both electricity and rent and believed that she would lose her children to child protective services if she couldn’t provide electricity. As a result, she stopped paying rent and was subsequently evicted. Without a house and money, Vanetta resorted to theft and ended up in jail, getting separated from her children. She and many others in similar situations just want to provide a good life for their children, but evictions make it much harder.
The book portrays the causes of poverty and how important affordable housing is. Desmond argues that it is not public housing or other housing policies but the dynamics of the private housing market that are fundamental to poverty in America. The lack of affordable housing caused most families to be left with little income, aggravating their poverty and deprivation. Home isn’t simply a place where someone lives. Home is a place where people grow and connect with others. A home can define who a person is and how they do in life. Having a place to live and call home is a major part of a person’s success. Eviction doesn’t just take one’s house, it causes their future to suffer as well.
Affordable housing has been a long-standing problem, and many governments have tried to implement policies to solve this problem. Ironically, the 2007–2009 recession that caused many of the problems discussed in the book started with the government loosening up the credit requirements for home loans, but the subsequent boom in housing pushed up the prices, which eventually led to the rise in interest rates and collapse of the housing market.
As the author states, affordable housing should be a right of every citizen. It is clear that finding a long-term solution for affordable housing for everyone has to remain as one of the top priorities for the government so that children can grow up in a safe and sound environment that they can call “home.”
