Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

Some middle-class people can’t help feeling incredulous, even furious, upon walking into a low-income household and spotting a big-screen television or fresh Nikes by the door. Conservative think tanks and news outlets publish reports with titles such as “Are You Poor If You Have a Flat-Screen TV?” and Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What Is Poverty in America? Liberals try to change the subject to avoid talking about behavior they wish would go away. That fancy television in the ratty apartment? Those new shoes worn by the kid eating free school lunch? Their owners likely didn’t pay full dollar for them. You can take a nice television off a hype for fifty bucks and find marked-down Nikes at the corner store. The price tags in inner-city clothing stores are for white suburban kids who don’t know how to haggle. Next to that big-screen television too it is harder to see what is missing. You are almost as likely to find as many televisions in a poor household as in a rich one. But most poor Americans do not own a computer. When Larraine ate her special meal, she didn’t even have a phone. See Tami Luhby, “Are You Poor If You Have a Flat-Screen TV?,” CNN Money, August 13, 2012; Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What Is Poverty in America? (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2011); US Energy Information Administration, Residential Energy Consumption Survey, 2012.