I picked up Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City recently, and, given the eviction moratorium during the pandemic, I was curious to learn more. It’s been a long time since I’ve rented my home. Still, it’s impossible to get online without seeing articles and comments about homeownership being out of reach of upcoming generations. I wondered if Evicted might help illuminate more for me.

The book is entirely based in Milwaukee but could easily be in any mid-size American city like Cincinnati, Raleigh, or Kansas City. Matthew Desmond, the author, spend years in Milwaukee living the poverty life and shadowing both tenants and landlords, white, black, male, and female. Evicted is mostly real human stories about life below the poverty line and the all-too-common lack of due process for evictions.

This book has many heart-wrenching stories, and there isn’t always a happy ending. On the one hand, I found myself frustrated by peoples’ inability to better their circumstances. On the other hand, I was FURIOUS with the systemic issues and inequalities keeping people from even having a shot at improving their circumstances. It’s a vicious cycle meant to keep people down.

The most crucial information in this book lives at the end in the epilogue and the “About This Project” sections. In these sections, you learn the toll this research took on Desmond. His interviews and shadowing took place in 2007-2008, but this book wasn’t published until 2017. Desmond explains that between his constant audio recording and written observations, he ended up with over 5000 pages of single-spaced notes. That would take anyone ten years to go through and pare down to create a story.

Since this took place during the Great Recession, it makes you wonder how much worse things have gotten around the country since 2008, especially during the last two years in a pandemic. The same types of people Desmond interviewed in Milwaukee live throughout this country and are often in hourly-service jobs or essential jobs without adequate benefits. These people are often caregivers; some caring for adults, some caring for children, and some caring for both.

What struck me in reading this book is the argument Desmond makes for the home being central to breaking negative generational trauma cycles. If you don’t have a stable home as a child (meaning physical location – psychological is a whole separate discussion), it’s nearly impossible to be able to focus on schoolwork. When a child is in survival mode all the time, there’s little space for learning and development, so these children fall behind, drop out of school, and often become parents – and thus, the cycle begins again. These systems and cycles disproportionately affect people of color, highlighting racial inequalities in other systems.

I hope Evicted shines a light on the need for stable housing for all and shapes the political debate. As populations rise and the gap between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us grows, more and more people will experience unstable housing in America. There are some happy moments in Evicted, but not all stories have happy endings – or even resolutions. That said, it’s definitely a book you should read.

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