Key Insights From:
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
By Matthew Desmond
Key Insights From:
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
By Matthew Desmond
What You'll Learn:
Eviction entails more than hanging up your keys, boxing up your things, and moving out—for those whom the typical American Dream has simply forgotten, moving out of a home entails moving out of a life. In 2013, the American Housing survey revealed that 70% of impoverished families spent half their wages to keep up with rising housing costs, channeling all their time, money, and energy into paying for a crumbling, bug-infested apartment they’d never be able to afford in the long run. Still, landlords thrust freshly printed eviction letters into the hands of millions of Americans every year. Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond crafts a stirring ethnographic account of the eviction process in Milwaukee and the lives on both sides of that slip of paper, from the evicted to the evictors, to pose an important question: What can we do better?
Key Insights:
- Evictions don’t close the door on poverty—they invite more in.
- When landlords let homes fall apart, tenants have little incentive to pay the rent.
- The eviction process is excruciating—from the judges to the tenants, no one is protected from its sadness.
- Landlords hold more than a tenant’s rent in their hands: They hold a tenant’s life too.
- Eviction is paralysis. The toll it takes on a human life is heavy.
- The money is there, it’s just going to the wrong place—government policies should recognize the necessity of affordable housing.
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