Lenny knew the druggies lived mostly on the north side of the trailer park, and the people working double shifts at restaurants or nursing homes lived mostly on the south side.

Consider this introductory portrait of the College Mobile Home Park, a poor white trailer home compound in South Milwaukee, and its manager, “Lenny”: One can find passages to admire on almost every page of Desmond’s book. Howell’s Hard Living on Clay Street (1972). It is thick with detail in the participant-observer tradition of sociology (Desmond took up residence among the families about whom he writes) and represents a new installment in a tradition dating back to Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) and continuing through Edward Banfield’s The Unheavenly City (1970) and a lesser-known but equally important book, Joseph T. One might note, for example, that drug use is destroying lives and neighborhoods, that marriage has disappeared from the lives of the poor, that reliance on income-support programs has made low-income households expert at obtaining benefits rather than working and saving, and that eviction is a symptom rather than the cause of such things-and, finally, that eviction may be simultaneously tragic and a last line of defense in the maintenance of a tenuous social order in low-income neighborhoods.Įvicted is an important book that provides an unvarnished account of the lives of the troubled and disorganized-some would say vulnerable-poor.

But the author’s unflinching, richly detailed narrative suggests other conclusions. Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, an ethnographic portrait of eight poor households in Milwaukee, should call readers’ attention, as the author sees it, to the fact that “millions of Americans are evicted every year because they can’t make rent” and that “fewer and fewer families can afford a roof over their head.” For Desmond, evictions are a core feature of the housing market, an event that “invites depression and illness, compels families to move into degrading housing in dangerous neighborhoods, uproots communities and harms children.” Certainly such conclusions can be drawn from Desmond’s richly drawn account, which tells the stories not only of those facing eviction in Milwaukee (where, he says, some 16,000 evictions occur annually) but also of those doing the evicting-the owners and managers of properties.Įvicted has attracted wide attention, most of it positive, and many of its admirers will endorse Desmond’s analysis and his call to make housing a “basic right,” provided by government through financial support to both tenants and owners. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond (Crown, 432 pp., $28)

Evicted by matthew desmond