Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

Mothers’ cries were heard over a century ago, when flames ravaged tenements, the fireproofing of which was deemed too costly; and they went up throughout the twentieth century, when ghetto housing in city after city ignited in flame or collapsed in decay. In Chicago alone, between 1947 and 1953 fires claimed the lives of over 180 slum dwellers, 63 of whom were under the age of ten. Conditions that invited fires—overcrowding, slipshod construction—also could prevent families from escaping. Throughout the 1960s and early ’70s, some landlords torched their own buildings to collect insurance money. Sometimes these buildings were vacant; sometimes they were not. Today, children living in substandard housing are more than ten times more likely to die in a fire than those living in decent and safe homes. Said Jacob Riis, a fire at night is “a horror that has few parallels in human experience.”