Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

Hi there! It’s Matt Desmond, author of “Evicted” and more recently, “Poverty, by America.” I’m so grateful to all of you who have read this book and connected to the people in it. I’ve added a few notes below to go behind the scenes and provide a bit more info and context. Thanks, again!

In Milwaukee, a city of fewer than 105,000 renter households, landlords evict roughly 16,000 adults and children each year. That’s sixteen families evicted through the court system daily.

When I first crunched these numbers, I was shocked. Since publishing “Evicted,” I founded the Eviction Lab, which has built the nation’s first-ever national database of evictions, culling over 100 million records going back to 2000. You can learn more about the eviction crisis in your community at www.evictionlab.org.

Sherrena already knew that. She had looked into it before. Her question wasn’t a question; it was a message to Eric, Mark, Kathy, and everyone else in the room that she would do almost anything to get the rent.

Many readers have asked me what I think about Sherrena. Some will even ask point blank if I think she’s a good or bad person. I always feel affirmed when I get these questions because I tried to capture Sherrena in all her different moods and complexities. I was very intentional about how her story would begin--with her delivering groceries to Arleen--and how it would end.

One day on a whim, Arleen stopped by the Housing Authority and asked about the List. A woman behind the glass told her, “The List is frozen.” On it were over 3,500 families who had applied for rent assistance four years earlier.

Not much has changed since I wrote these sentences. The wait time for public housing in our biggest cities is not counted in years but decades. I have two young kids now. If I applied for public housing today in Washington, DC, for example, chances are I’d be a grandfather before my application was reviewed.

“This is my property,” the landlords answered. “This is myyy property!” Karen boomed, her finger pointing to the land below. The voices in the room went up in unison, a proud and powerful chorus: “This is my property! Myyyyy property!”

I still have my certificate from landlord training. In recent years, there have been many reforms to eviction court. Several cities have established a “right to counsel,” providing all families facing eviction with an attorney, while others have developed successful eviction diversion programs, like the one in Philadelphia that requires landlords to try diversion before filing for eviction.

The real money was made in rents. Every month Sherrena collected roughly $20,000 in rent. Her monthly mortgage bills rounded out to $8,500. After paying the water bill, Sherrena—who owned three dozen inner-city units, all filled with tenants around or below the poverty line—figured she netted roughly $10,000 a month, more than what Arleen, Lamar, and many of her other tenants took home in a year. As Sherrena liked to put it: “The ’hood is good. There’s a lot of money there.”

Since publishing “Evicted,” I’ve continued to research and report on landlords. I published a study a few years ago that found that, nationwide, landlords operating in poor neighborhoods make double that of landlords in affluent communities. I expand on this theme in my new book, “Poverty, by America,” which explores the dynamics and consequences of exploitation.

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.

“Evicted” help to shine a light on the problem of nuisance ordinances that were resulting in domestic violence survivors being evicted for repeatedly calling 911. Milwaukee revised its ordinance because of my research, and the ACLU and other legal organizations have drawn on it to litigate against a number of cities whose nuisance ordinances harm vulnerable women.

Larraine didn’t put anything on layaway that day. But when her food stamps kicked in, she went to the grocery store and bought two lobster tails, shrimp, king crab legs, salad, and lemon meringue pie. Bringing it all back to Beaker’s trailer, she added Cajun seasoning to the crab legs and cooked the lobster tails in lemon butter at 350 degrees. She ate everything alone, in a single sitting, washing it down with Pepsi. The meal consumed her entire monthly allocation of food stamps. It was her and Glen’s anniversary, and she wanted to do something special. “I know our relationship may not have been good, but it was our relationship,” she said. “Some things I will not ever get over.” But the lobster helped.

Knowing how the poor have been shamed and singled-out for doing very human things, I was nervous to write about this moment. But Larraine wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed, and her sense of whimsy helped empower me to write about her special meal. Lobster on Food Stamps become one of the most discussed chapters in my book, sparking conversations about how Larraine splurged like this not because her benefits left her with so much but with so little.

The next day, Natasha swaddled her tiny, cherished boy and took him back to the rat hole.

My student Gracie Himmelstein, who is now a doctor and a sociologist, studied how eviction harms babies in the womb. In a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, she found that infants born to mothers threatened with eviction experience adverse birth outcomes, which have been shown to have lifelong and even multigenerational consequences. Of all the studies I’ve advised or authored on eviction, this one is the most chilling.

What the judge was saying, in essence, was: We all agree that you were poor and scared when you did this violent, hurtful thing, and if you had been allowed to go on working five days a week at Old Country Buffet, refilling soup pots and mopping up frozen yogurt spills, none of us would be here right now. You might have been able to save enough to move to an apartment that was de-leaded and clean in a neighborhood without drug dealers and with safe schools. With time, you may have been able to get Bo-Bo the medical treatment he needs for his seizures, and maybe you could have even started taking night classes to become a nurse, like you always wanted. And, who knows, maybe you could have actually become a nurse, a real nurse with a uniform and everything. Then you could really give your kids a childhood that would look nothing like the one Shortcake gave you. If you did that, you would walk around this cold city with your head held high, and maybe you would eventually come to feel that you were worth something and deserving of a man who could support you other than by lending you his pistol for a stickup or at least one who didn’t break down your door and beat you in front of your children. Maybe you would meet someone with a steady job and get married in a small church with Kendal standing proudly up front by the groom and Tembi as the poofy-dressed flower girl and Bo-Bo as the grinning, toddling ring bearer, just like you always dreamed it, and from that day on your groo...

There have been a few times in my writing life when the words seem to have a power and sentience of their own. The sentences aren’t written; they just come somehow. That’s what it felt like with this paragraph, my favorite in the book. I was having the hardest time trying to figure out how to end Vanetta’s story, and then one late night I envisioned another life for her, based on aspirations and dreams she had shared with me, and wrote this. Today, Vanetta is well, working fulltime and caring for her children.

A problem as big as the affordable-housing crisis calls for a big solution. It should be at the top of America’s domestic-policy agenda—because it is driving poor families to financial ruin and even starting to engulf families with moderate incomes. Today, over 1 in 5 of all renting families in the country spends half of its income on housing.34 America can and should work to make its cities livable again.

COVID intensified the eviction crisis. Traffic to www.justshelter.org--a website I created to connect people with nonprofit organizations fighting evictions and promoting affordable housing--soared, as scores of Americans who had never before faced eviction were suddenly without work. Housing organizers advocated for renter protections, and the federal government responded with bold relief. I worked with the White House to push for the national eviction moratorium—which reduced the pandemic death rate by 11 percent—and emergency rental assistance, which caused evictions to plummet to record lows months after the moratorium ended. But the rental housing crisis continues unabated. Last year, rents jumped by 11 percent nationwide, the largest net increase on record.

I wanted to try to write a book about poverty that didn’t focus exclusively on poor people or poor places. Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.

But of course, poverty in America is bigger than the housing crisis. We are the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. In my new book, “Poverty, by America,” I lay out why there is so much poverty in this land of dollars and make a case for how to eliminate it. I lay out why there is so much poverty in this land of dollars and make a case for how to eliminate it.I hope you’ll pick it up and continue the conversation with me here on Goodreads! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61358638-poverty-by-america