Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

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.