Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

In the 1960s and 1970s, destitute families often relied on extended kin networks to get by. Poor black families were “immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,” wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did little to lift families out of poverty, but it was enough to keep them afloat.5 But large-scale social transformations—the crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them—had frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit “kin dependence” by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.6 The family was no longer a reliable source of support for poor people. Middle-class kin often did not know how to help or did not want to.7 And poor kin were often too poor or troubled or addicted to lend much of a hand. Legal entanglements got in the way too.