Evicted by Mattew Desmond

When talking about the housing crises and subsequent recession of ‘08, I used to blame it almost entirely for my parent’s divorce. I’d usually posit that had the market not crashed, employment not taken a nosedive, then my mom and stepdad could have made things work. This was largely an effort to couple a personal affront with a larger criticism of the system. The problem with what I was doing was not relative to the truth of the matter, but more of a problem with using the power of narrative to contextualize flaws in the system. After all, my parent’s divorce was not proof of predatory lending or high stakes debt investments, the only credibility it lent my argument (assuming it is true) was that my life was adversely affected by the housing market crash. This is an example of a strong rhetorical tool overtaking the argument it was meant only to bolster.

I’ll be clear, this is far from what Matthew Desmond does in his book Evicted. Desmond meticulously documents poverty in Milwaukee inner cities and rural trailer parks as only a professional journalist could. While first focusing on two landlords and some tenants, he then magnifies these stories, tracking them into some increasingly dark places. Evicted is an exceptionally important book because of the way in which it documents our country’s failure in dealing with our most vulnerable citizens. These are not sob stories, they are gritty realities meant to frustrate the reader.

Each tenant, or character as you might mistakenly be apt to call them, is extorted by their landlord in the most sickening ways. They are thrown increasingly into drug addiction and poverty as eviction after eviction piles up. The stories are heartbreaking, unfair, and gut wrenching. Every American should read them so they can get a glimpse of the way this country is designed to profit off suffering. The idea is that, unlike regular, middle-class tenants, in order to make a profit off our poorest citizens, the landlord must milk a high number of them for everything they are worth. This makes the eviction a pivotal tool. It allows landlords to remove a tenant at the moment they become unprofitable. The result is a terrifyingly fast carousel of poverty and profit.

Despite the fact that Desmond litters Eviction with hard numbers and detailed passages on flawed housing policy, it could still be entirely possible for readers to walk away from it thinking greedy landlords are the problem, or the government, or ineffectual social programs. This is because the main focus is on the way the narrative of downtrodden people like Arleen makes us feel, not what systemic policy most likely put her there. While the descriptions of poverty and the cyclical brutality of the inner-city may make us physically wince, they detract and overshadow the brief passages on causation. At the same time, the descriptions are necessary for any reader concerned with living in and creating a just society.

For this reason, Desmond's book is worth reading, but cautiously. It is an excellent ancillary text that lends itself to a worldview already privy to the flaws of capitalism and America's perpetual reliance on poverty for profit. As a conversation starter it runs the risks inherent in narrative style non-fiction, so resist the urge to recommend it to your mother-in-law's book club.