Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

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

It can be overwhelming to consider how much happiness has been lost, how many capabilities snuffed out, by the swell of poverty in this land and our collective decision not to provide all our citizens with a stable and decent place to live.

“Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence.

Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.42 It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets.

If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering—by no American value is this situation justified. No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.