From the Bookshelf of Not Exceeding Ten Miles Square…

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Matthew Desmond

Start date: October 4, 2017

Finish date: December 6, 2017

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Dec 06, 2017 ambyr rated it it was amazing

Shelves: characterㅡlgbt, authorㅡmale, characterㅡdisabled, protagonistㅡmultiple-genders, genreㅡnonfictionㅡcities, acquiredㅡfrom-work, genreㅡnonfiction, formatㅡaudiobook, bored-now

I am wealthy because my grandparents worked their way out of poverty to become Milwaukee landlords with a substantial real estate empire. They were not slumlords; they rented modest but well-maintained apartments (the earliest built with my grandfather's own hands) to working-class people with modest but stable employment. I don't think my grandmother (dealing with people was always my grandmother's job) evicted more than a handful of people in her multi-decades career. I'd like to think they ma I am wealthy because my grandparents worked their way out of poverty to become Milwaukee landlords with a substantial real estate empire. They were not slumlords; they rented modest but well-maintained apartments (the earliest built with my grandfather's own hands) to working-class people with modest but stable employment. I don't think my grandmother (dealing with people was always my grandmother's job) evicted more than a handful of people in her multi-decades career. I'd like to think they made their millions without inflicting the sort of pain and suffering depicted in this book.

But then, they would never have rented to any of the people profiled here, because one prior eviction, one failed credit check, and they would have tossed the application and moved on to the next. And that's the rub, isn't it? It's easy to keep your hands clean when you never touch anything that's likely to dirty them. It's easy to feel virtuous about never evicting anyone when you would never rent to anyone who was an eviction risk. But that doesn't solve the problem; it just makes it someone else's problem. The poor, the unstable, the mentally ill, the unlucky, the addicted: they still need somewhere to go.

This book is a devastating critique of how our society has made poverty into a black hole from which it's impossible to escape, how perverse incentives make housing for the very poor as expensive if not more so than cleaner, better-maintained housing that their eviction records put forever out of their reach, how the system is rigged to punish them for reporting everything from code violations to domestic violence. We live in a world where calling 911 to summon an ambulance for a sick child can result in a "nuisance property" label and a prompt eviction. Where a landlord writing "We suggested she obtain a gun and kill [her abusive boyfriend] in self defense, but evidently she hasn’t" is accepted by the police as a reasonable justification for eviction. Where there is almost no opportunity for upward social mobility.

I can't say I like that world very much. I wonder what my grandparents would have made of it. ...more

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Jul 02, 2017 DW Rowlands rated it really liked it

Shelves: topic-soc-race, topic-cities, recs-alex-baca, category-academic, topic-soc-wealth, recs-urban-book-club

Some of this book--such as the horrifying laws that essentially require to evict tenants for repeatedly calling the police for domestic violence, and thus encourage domestic violence victims not to call the police--was not new to me, but a lot of the details of how the eviction process and how slum rental housing work were quite new and quite interesting. I was not entirely surprised, but certainly found it interesting, to learn the details of just how much the system is rigged against poor tena ...more

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Dec 10, 2016 Garret rated it it was ok

Only made it halfway. Apparently there is a bit of policy talk at the end, but it's mostly ethnography. It's reasonably well-written, and the stories are sad, but I was hoping for good housing policy analysis. ...more

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