Evicted by Matthew Desmond has an important message about the impacts of housing insecurity, but it feels like he didn’t trust his readers to care unless he dressed it up with a lot of trauma porn and poverty porn.
This book follows eight families in Milwaukee… if I remember correctly, their stories all took place in a similar timespan in the mid-aughts. Each of these families finds themselves evicted at least once in the course of the book; several of them go through many cycles of losing housing, finding a new place, and losing it again. They are each struggling with poverty for different reasons — addiction, disability, lack of an education, generational poverty, and more.
Desmond also profiles a couple of landlords, each of whom play a role in multiple families’ stories. And if you don’t already think All Landlords Are Bastards (ALAB), you might feel differently after reading this book. Obviously not all landlords engage in the sort of slumlord tactics that are in play in Evicted, but they’re all out there trying to get rich off of providing a basic human necessity, constantly doing a cost-benefit analysis of whether you deserve repairs or improvements to your home, and how much they can raise your rent before you move out.
Ahem, sorry, I’m still salty at my landlord for my middle class rental house taking over a week to replace my fridge when it died last year.
Anyway, the author follows the families around Milwaukee as they try to keep a roof over their heads. Many of them have dependents to worry about. Most if not all end up spending time in a shelter, on the street, couch surfing, or putting way too many people into too small of a home. Along the way, they get denied benefits and ripped off by landlords, self-storage companies, and under-the-table employment, among other things.
As I mentioned, this book feels like trauma porn and poverty porn. Desmond dedicates more page space than I would really like to depictions of drug use, or yelling matches between people who are under a lot of stress and lashing out at those around them. The people feel like living stereotypes of the poor: a junkie on his way to hitting rock bottom; a woman with multiple baby daddies; the person who doesn’t want to work because they’re happier receiving government benefits; the poor racist whites who’d rather live on the street than the Black neighborhood. And as already stated, the landlords too feel like they’re straight out of central casting, crying about how they have bills to pay as they return from their tropical vacation in time to go out and collect the rent.
I do believe that Desmond is being honest in how he depicts the reality of the people who invited him into their lives for his research; I just feel like there’s such a thing as too much honesty. Give these families a bit of dignity, don’t give us a play-by-play of the lowest moments of their lives.
Over all, I was left with a feeling that the families in this book weren’t just failed by the housing system, they were failed by the system as a whole. Some of them were failed by family, friends, their church. For sure, they were not being caught by the so-called “social safety net.” Even if each of them had been able to get a safe, stable home, they might have still struggled to get their kids into good schools, to get help with their addictions, or to get access to any medical care they needed.
I was left especially frustrated by the story of a young mother who, in desperation about being able to pay the rent and feed her kids, participated in a scheme with some friends to rob some women at gun point. She showed remorse for her crime, but the judge still sentenced her under the belief that since her circumstances hadn’t changed, she might well be tempted to commit another violent crime. But how was sending this woman to prison going to help her and her children in the long run? It’s just going to further the cycle of poverty that led to her making a dangerous mistake.
Anyway, Desmond closes the book with some ideas of how we can improve the housing situation for families like those he profiled, all over the US. And I just didn’t feel like his ideas were far-reaching enough. I guess we have to start somewhere, and we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but “overhaul and expand the housing voucher program” is only going to put a dent in the poverty crisis. Landlords are still going to look for ways to cut corners; politicians are still going to try to put limitations on the program that will cause families to fall through the cracks when they make a mistake or have a long run of bad luck.
Over all, this book just left me feeling depressed, that we have so many resources in this country and we still let people suffer in houses with holes in the windows, no major appliances, and faulty plumbing, desperately trying to cobble meals together for their children, who may or may not end up making it to school on any given day, while their landlords drive around in luxury cars to scout out which properties they should buy next.
TWs and CWs: Racism, including ample use of the n-word, mentions of past sexual assault (including of minors), mentions of domestic violence, depictions of drug use, discussion of addiction, illness, and injury, mentions of gun violence and shooting deaths, and probably a few other things I’m forgetting.
Source and Format: I read this as an audiobook from Seattle Public Libraries. This was another book where I wished I had not gone for the audio format, as I would have preferred to skim some of the less pleasant sections, and I couldn’t listen to it on my home speakers with my windows open, less my neighbors get an earful of offensive language.
Book Bingo Prompts
SAL/SPL Adult Summer Reading: Housing/Poverty Justice. This book feels like a pretty obvious choice for the prompt, and while I didn’t necessarily enjoy reading it, I do appreciate that Desmond made the topic approachable and rooted in humanity, rather than writing a very dry and academic book.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): Finding Home. Something I’ve not mentioned on this blog yet is that we’re currently shopping for a home. Finding a place to live is stressful no matter your circumstances, but there’s such a huge gap between the experience that we’re having as a white, middle-aged, DINKWAD couple with a good credit rating, versus the experience of the families profiled in this book. We all deserve to be making calculations of location vs. layout vs. price vs. features, rather than having to accept whatever place we can make work on our fixed income. Housing is a human right. We all just want to find a home where we feel safe and can build a life worth living.
Book Bingo Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 20 out of 25 prompts complete. 3 bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 17 out of 25 prompts complete. 3 bingos.
SAL/SPL Adult Summer Reading: 21 out of 23 prompts complete, 6 bingos.
SBTB Summer Romance: 5 out of 24 prompts complete, 0 bingos.