Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. 

3/5 rating. 313 pages.

Book #42 of 2023. Read October 8, 2023.

This book talks about many Milwaukee residents and how their lives are impacted by the fear, and actual act, of eviction.

Eviction of people from the place they stay is an all-too-common incident for the poor of many cities. While it is so easy for people to write off the causes as laziness, or lack of drive, this is overwhelmingly not the case. Many of the people who are followed throughout this book pay over 60, 70, and sometimes up to over 90% of their paycheck on housing. For an expense which is not recommended at over 30%, this is unreal, and almost none of us would be able to manage to stay afloat when almost every dollar of income must go to rent, let alone other bills and groceries.

Matthew does a great job of humanizing the victims of some horrendous acts by landlords. These range from charging exorbitantly high rent, to not doing any upkeep, to discriminating against children and families.

It is also clear that as Matthew says:

“Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.” Many people in this book were already struggling to pay rent with their meager pay, then some small thing came up and they fell behind. When they were evicted, this often led to them having to either quit their job or be fired because they had to go to eviction court, or they have to spend time looking for where they might sleep that night.

With the nationwide housing issues currently, it looks like evictions are certainly not going away. This is an important book because of that, but between reading “The Color of Law” and “Invisible Child”, I was already aware of many things in this book. If I had not already read those, this certainly would’ve gotten a higher rating.

Quotes:

“If you count all forms of involuntary displacement – formal and informal evictions, landlord foreclosures, building condemnations – you discover that between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move.”

“These economic transformations – which were happening in cities across America – devastated Milwaukee’s black workers, half of whom held manufacturing jobs. When plants closed, they tended to close in the inner city, where black Milwaukeeans lived. The black poverty rate rose to 28 percent in 1980. By 1990, it had climbed to 42 percent.”

“Since 1970, the number of people primarily employed as property managers had more than quadrupled.”

“Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem. More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems – as were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did not.”

“Then it all came crashing down. Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11 percent reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31 percent of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent.”

“It was next to impossible for people to survive deep poverty on their own.”

“No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.”

“All over the city, people who lived in distressed neighborhoods were more likely to help their neighbors pay bills, buy groceries, fix their car, or lend a hand in other ways, compared to their peers in better-off areas.”

“This year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative.”

“What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department’s own rules presented battered women with a devil’s bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction.”

“As long as we’re together and we’re happy and positive things are said. And I just want to tell them that they’re beautiful, ’cause my girls are the strongest little women in the world.”

“In 1930, the death rate for Milwaukee’s blacks was nearly 60 percent higher than the citywide rate, due in large part to poor housing conditions.”

“The 1968 Civil Rights Act made housing discrimination illegal, but subtler forms prevailed. Crystal and Vanetta wanted to leave the ghetto, but landlords like the one on Fifteenth Street turned them away. Other landlords and property management companies – like Affordable Rentals – tried to avoid discriminating by setting clear criteria and holding all applicants to the same standards. But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans.”

“He and his brother would have to switch schools. Jori didn’t care. He switched schools all the time. Between seventh and eighth grades, he had attended five different schools – when he went at all.”

“America is supposed to be a place where you can better yourself, your family, and your community. But this is only possible if you have a stable home. When Scott was provided with an affordable apartment through the Guest House’s permanent housing program, he was able to stay off heroin, find meaningful work as a resident manager for homeless people, and begin striving for independence. He remains stably housed and sober.”

“For almost a century, there has been broad consensus in America that families should spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Until recently, most renting families met this goal. But times have changed – in Milwaukee and across America. Every year in this country, people are evicted from their homes not by the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands but by the millions.”

“Residential stability begets a kind of psychological stability, which allows people to invest in their home and social relationships. It begets school stability, which increases the chances that children will excel and graduate. And it begets community stability, which encouraged families to form strong bonds and take care of their block.”

“Eviction can cause workers to lose their jobs. The likelihood of being laid off is roughly 15 percent higher for workers who have experienced an eviction. If housing instability leads to employment instability, it is because the stress and consuming nature of being forced from your home wreak havoc on people’s work performance. Often, evicted families also lose the opportunity to benefit from public housing because Housing Authorities count evictions and unpaid debt as strikes when reviewing applications. And so people who have the greatest need for housing assistance – the rent-burdened and evicted – are systematically denied it.”

“Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.”

“When these mothers finally did find another place to live, they once again began giving landlords most of their income, leaving little for their kids. Families who spend more on housing spend less on their children. Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market. Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation.”

“The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”

“Today, over 1 in 5 of all renting families in the country spends half of its income on housing.”

“[W]e must think differently about another right: the right to make as much money as possible by providing families with housing – and especially to profit excessively from the less fortunate.”

“Expanding housing vouchers without stabilizing rent would be asking taxpayers to subsidize landlords’ profits. Today, landlords overcharge voucher holders simply because they can. In distressed neighborhoods, where voucher holders tend to live, market rent is lower than what landlords are allowed to charge voucher holders, according to metropolitan-wide rent ceilings set by program administrators. So the Housing Choice Voucher Program likely costs not millions but billions of dollars more than it should, resulting in the unnecessary denial of help to hundreds of thousands of families. In fact, economists have argued that the current housing voucher program could be expanded to serve all poor families in America without additional spending if we prevented overcharging and made the program more efficient.”

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