Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

For decades, we’ve focused mainly on jobs, public assistance, parenting, and mass incarceration. No one can deny the importance of these issues, but something fundamental is missing. We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.

the last forty years had witnessed the professionalization of property management. Since 1970, the number of people primarily employed as property managers had more than quadrupled.

People who got half an ear everywhere else got a full one from Lenny.

“Sometimes I’m a shrink,” he liked to say. “Sometimes I’m the village asshole.”

When tenants fell behind, he had three options. He could let it slide and watch his income fall, he could begin eviction proceedings, or he could start a conversation.

She wanted to take a hot shower, scrub away the smell. She wanted to feel clean, maybe even something closer to pretty, like she used to feel when she danced on tables for men, back when her daughters were babies. She wanted the water to soothe the pain of her fibromyalgia, which she likened to “a million knives” going up her back. She had prescriptions for Lyrica and Celebrex but didn’t always have enough for the copay. Hot water would help.

Some kids born into poverty set their sights on doing whatever it takes to get out. Jori wasn’t going anywhere, sensing he was put on this Earth to look after Arleen and Jafaris. He was, all fourteen years of him, the man of the house.

Most poor people in America were like Arleen: they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.

single eviction could destabilize multiple city blocks, not only the block from which a family was evicted but also the block to which it begrudgingly relocated. In this way, displacement contributed directly to what Jacobs called “perpetual slums,” churning environments with high rates of turnover and even higher rates of resentment and disinvestment.

Landlords were allowed to rent units with property code violations, and even units that did not meet “basic habitability requirements,” as long as they were up front about the problems.6

Because the rent took almost all of their paycheck, families sometimes had to initiate a necessary eviction that allowed them to save enough money to move to another place.

For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetually behind; and many poor tenants would be perpetually behind because their rent was too high.

Like any other romance, Scott’s relationship with fentanyl changed from something thrilling and magical into something deeper and more consuming. Soon, he was no longer chasing a high but running from withdrawal.

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.

Patrice never felt her existence questioned. She tried not to go to parts of the city where she did. Patrice lived four miles away from the shore of Lake Michigan: an hour on foot, a half hour by bus, fifteen minutes by car. She had never been.

The same thing that made homeownership a bad investment in poor, black neighborhoods—depressed property values—made landlording there a potentially lucrative one.

“What kind of parent am I to just listen to her and not listen to you?” she said, softly. “But this is what comes when you lose your house. This is what comes.”

After accounting for these expenses, vacancies, and missing payments, Tobin took home roughly $447,000 each year, half of what the alderman had reported.3 Still, Tobin belonged to the top 1 percent of income earners. Most of his tenants belonged to the bottom 10 percent.

Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They “helped get rid of the riffraff,” some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.

All over the city, people who lived in distressed neighborhoods were more likely to help their neighbors pay bills, buy groceries, fix their car, or lend a hand in other ways, compared to their peers in better-off areas.6 These exchanges helped people on the receiving end meet basic material needs; and they helped those on the delivering end feel more fully human. But for such vital exchanges to take place, residents had to make their needs known and acknowledge their failures.

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.

Larraine was careless with her money because she operated under a “poverty mentality.” To Sammy, Pastor Daryl, and others, Larraine was poor because she threw money away. But the reverse was more true. Larraine threw money away because she was poor.

The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure.

Belt Buckle called and told Pam and Ned that their application had been approved. Pam had two evictions on her record, was a convicted felon, and received welfare. Ned had an outstanding warrant, no verifiable income, and a long record that included three evictions, felony drug convictions, and several misdemeanors like reckless driving and carrying a concealed weapon. They had five daughters. But they were white.

“No one’s trying to get better. Makes me not want to get better. If you’re around people every day that doesn’t want to do anything, eventually you will feel like doing nothing.”

In the inner city, much was made of early milestones. Later ones might never come.

Arleen rubbed her boy’s head and told him he should be happy leaving the shelter. Jafaris didn’t understand why. It was quiet and warm,

The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets.

In languages spoken all over the world, the word for “home” encompasses not just shelter but warmth, safety, family—the womb.

a good home can serve as the sturdiest of footholds. When people have a place to live, they become better parents, workers, and citizens.

Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.

Establishing publicly funded legal services for low-income families in housing court would be a cost-effective measure that would prevent homelessness, decrease evictions, and give poor families a fair shake.

Poverty is two-faced—a matter of income and expenses, input and output—and in a world of exploitation, it will not be effectively ameliorated if we ignore this plain fact.

economists have argued that the current housing voucher program could be expanded to serve all poor families in America without additional spending if we prevented overcharging and made the program more efficient.

Everything about you—your race and gender, where and how you were raised, your temperament and disposition—can influence whom you meet, what is confided to you, what you are shown, and how you interpret what you see.

for every eviction executed through the judicial system, there are two others executed beyond the purview of the court, without any form of due process.

the presence of children in the household almost tripled a tenant’s odds of receiving an eviction judgment.