Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

Families have watched their incomes stagnate, or even fall, while their housing costs have soared. Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on.3

1 in 8 poor renting families nationwide were unable to pay all of their rent,

housing had become a business.

She had prescriptions for Lyrica and Celebrex but didn’t always have enough for the copay.

Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.4

In the vast majority of cases (83 percent), landlords who received a nuisance citation for domestic violence responded by either evicting the tenants or by threatening to evict them for future police calls.

What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department’s own rules presented battered women with a devil’s bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction.11

do we believe that the right to a decent home is part of what it means to be an American?

The United States was founded on the noble idea that people have “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Each of these three unalienable rights—so essential to the American character that the founders saw them as God-given—requires a stable home.

Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.

Just as we have outlawed discrimination on the basis of race or religion, discrimination against voucher holders would be illegal under a universal voucher program.