
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
This book follows a few different families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin living in poverty (and a few of the landlords). It’s written in a very journalistic way–Desmond is a fly on the wall watching and writing everything down. At the end of the book he explains that during the fieldwork, he lived in one of the trailer parks, knows he was treated a certain way for being a white man, and found it difficult not to intervene more than he did. One thing he emphasizes is how under-researched the topic of eviction is. It’s so easy to evict people on a whim, and it’s so hard to pay rent when your income in less than $1000 a month. One person was making $650 a month and their rent was $600. Shit like that. Or another would be so behind on their rent, and they’d finally give their last amount of money and still get evicted the next day. It’s just so circular–you don’t make enough, you can’t/can barely pay the rent, then you get evicted (which has tremendous psychological effects), you start searching