Kyle’s Reviews > Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City > Status Update

There are no heroes in the story about the failure of a society even as Scott overcomes his addiction and steadily works to regain his nursing credentials, the overall impression of Evicted is Arleen’s Sisyphean journey from one shoddy apartment to the next. Matthew offers a postscript to explain how the ethnographical sausage was made, appearing in the text as a car-owning friend, but kept his gaze on us.

After a fatal fire and other catastrophes, many of the families continue their hunt for their next home with many, many obstacles thrown in their way. In addition to drugs, arrests and prior evictions, the most depressing reason for the constant rejected applications are the children each family (mostly the mothers) struggle to house. A sociological history lesson looks back on several centuries of pervasive poverty.

While rent money is the driving factor for all the exchanges between landlords like Sherrena and their cash-strapped tenants, two other currencies are always at hand: food stamps and drugs. The former is a necessity for all families that gets traded for favours while the latter is the cause of and escape from so many troubles. Neither provide any pleasure and even a third unspoken commodity, sex, is more of a burden.

While their doesn’t seem to be any clear winners in the centuries-old American game of passing the buck, for the struggling poor families living in the inner city it is a demeaning game of Duck Duck Goose landlords and welfare agencies play among themselves. When duck-counting stops, figuratively, another family needs to scramble to find a new place while another unfortunate becomes the grubby goose of this game.

The repetitiveness is understandable: this is a nationwide problem being explored at the civic and interpersonal level: one city with a growing cast of destitute evictees. The sympathy gained for their life-long misfortune soon evaporates in every landlord gathering and the chanting affirmation to prove how they all had it coming. Poverty perpetuates the race and gender lines for those who get locked up or thrown out