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WINNER OF THE 2017 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NONFICTION
In Evicted, Harvard sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of 21st-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTION | WINNER OF THE PEN/JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH AWARD FOR NONFICTION | WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION | FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by The New York Times Book Review • The Boston Globe • The Washington Post • NPR • Entertainment Weekly • The New Yorker • Bloomberg • Esquire • Buzzfeed • Fortune • San Francisco Chronicle • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Politico • The Week • Bookpage • Kirkus Reviews • Amazon • Barnes and Noble Review • Apple • Library Journal • Chicago Public Library • Publishers Weekly • Booklist • Shelf Awareness
- Sales Rank: #313 in Books
- Brand: BROADWAY
- Published on: 2017-02-28
- Released on: 2017-02-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.98" h x .97" w x 5.31" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 448 pages
- BROADWAY
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of March 2016: It’s the rare writer who can capture a social ill with a clear-eyed, nonjudgmental tone and still allow the messiness of real people its due. Matthew Desmond does just that with Evicted as he explores the stories of tenants and landlords in the poorest areas of Milwaukee during 2008 and 2009. It’s almost always a compliment to say that a nonfiction book reads like a novel and this one does – mostly because Desmond gets very close to the “characters,” relating their words and thoughts and layering on enough vibrant details to make every rented property or trailer come alive. You can almost forget that these are actual people with actual problems until he delivers a raw jolt of reality: the woman who’s evicted because her boyfriend beats her up; the tenant whose baby daughter dies in a house fire; the tenant who pushes a “friend” out a window for using all her cell phone minutes; the landlord who refuses to fix stopped-up pipes, so tenants allow garbage and sewage to pile up in the property.
Through both personal stories and data, Desmond proves that eviction undermines self, family, and community, bearing down disproportionately hard on women with children. In Milwaukee, being behind on rent gives landlords the opening to serve an eviction notice, which leads to a court date. On the face of it, it may seem easy to side with the landlords—of course tenants should pay their rent. But as Evicted pulls back layer after layer, what’s exposed is a cycle of hurt that all parties—landlord, tenant, city—inflict on one another. Whether readers agree with Desmond’s conclusions for how to break this cycle in order to strengthen families and neighborhoods, it’s obvious by the end of Evicted that there is no easy fix, and that people—some addicts, some criminals—will slip through the cracks. But it should be just as obvious that we must still try.
—Adrian Liang Review
"Astonishing...Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard—a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist too, and one who, like Katherine Boo in her study of a Mumbai slum, has set a new standard for reporting on poverty."
—Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times Book Review
“I’ve come to think of Evicted as a comet book — the sort of thing that swings around only every so often, and is, for those who’ve experienced it, pretty much impossible to forget. It regally combines policy reporting and ethnography, following eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to find that most basic human necessity: shelter. After reading Evicted, you’ll realize you cannot have a serious conversation about poverty without talking about housing. You will also have the mad urge to press it into the hands of every elected official you meet. The book is that good, and it’s that unignorable. Nothing else this year came close.”
—Jennifer Senior, New York Times Critics’ Top Books of 2016
“In this astonishing feat of ethnography, Desmond immerses himself in the lives of Milwaukee families caught in the cycle of chronic eviction. In spare and penetrating prose, this Harvard sociologist chronicles the economic and psychological toll of living in substandard housing, and the eviscerating impact of constantly moving between homes and shelters. With Evicted, Desmond has made it impossible to consider poverty without grappling with the role of housing. This pick [as best book of 2016] was not close.”
—Carlos Lozada, Washington Post
“Written with the vividness of a novel, [Evicted] offers a dark mirror of middle-class America’s obsession with real estate, laying bare the workings of the low end of the market, where evictions have become just another part of an often lucrative business model.”
—Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times
“My God, what [Evicted] lays bare about American poverty. It is devastating and infuriating and a necessary read.”
—Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Difficult Women
"It doesn't happen every week (or every month, or even year), but every once in a while a book comes along that changes the national conversation... Evicted looks to be one of those books."
—Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review
“An essential piece of reportage about poverty and profit in urban America.”
—Geoff Dyer, The Guardian’s Best Holiday Reads 2016
"Should be required reading in an election year, or any other."
—Entertainment Weekly
“Thank you, Matthew Desmond. Thank you for writing about destitution in America with astonishing specificity yet without voyeurism or judgment. Thank you for showing it is possible to compose spare, beautiful prose about a complicated policy problem. Thank you for giving flesh and life to our squabbles over inequality, so easily consigned to quintiles and zero-sum percentages. Thank you for proving that the struggle to keep a roof over one’s head is a cause, not just a characteristic of poverty... Evicted is an extraordinary feat of reporting and ethnography. Desmond has made it impossible to ever again consider poverty in America without tackling the role of housing—and without grappling with Evicted.”
—Washington Post
“Powerful, monstrously effective…[Evicted] documents with impressive steadiness of purpose and command of detail the lives of impoverished renters at the bottom of Milwaukee’s housing market…In describing the plight of these people, Desmond reveals the confluence of seemingly unrelated forces that have conspired to create a thoroughly humiliated class of the almost or soon-to-be homeless…But the power of this book abides in the indelible impression left by its stories.”
—Jill Leovy, The American Scholar
“Gripping and important…Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, cites plenty of statistics but it’s his ethnographic gift that lends the work such force. He’s one of a rare academic breed: a poverty expert who engages with the poor. His portraits are vivid and unsettling…It’s not easy to show desperate people using drugs or selling sex and still convey their courage and dignity. Evicted pulls it off.”
—Jason DeParle, New York Review of Books
“[Desmond] tells a complex, achingly powerful story… There have been many well-received urban ethnographies in recent years, from Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day to Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Desmond’s Evicted surely deserves to takes [its] place among these. It is an exquisitely crafted, meticulously researched exploration of life on the margins, providing a voice to people who have been shamefully ignored—or, worse, demonized—by opinion makers over the course of decades.”
—The Boston Globe
"[An] impressive work of scholarship... novelistically detailed... As Mr. Desmond points out, eviction has been neglected by urban sociologists, so his account fills a gap. His methodology is scrupulous."
—Wall Street Journal
"A shattering account of life on the American fringe, Matthew Desmond’s Evicted shows the reality of a housing crisis that few among the political or media elite ever think much about, let alone address. It takes us to the center of what would be seen as an emergency of significant proportions if the poor had any legitimate political agency in American life."
—The New Republic
“Wrenching and revelatory… Other sociologists have ventured before into the realm of popular literature… but none in recent memory have so successfully bridged in a single work the demands of the academy (statistical studies and deep reviews of the existing literature) and the narrative necessity of showing what has brought these beautiful, flawed humans to their miseries… A powerfully convincing book that examines the poor’s impossible housing situation at point-blank range.”
—The Nation
“Extraordinary… I can’t remember when an ethnographic study so deepened my understanding of American life."
—Katha Pollitt, The Guardian
“Evicted stands among the very best of the social justice books… The book is meticulously reported and beautifully written, balancing statistics with family stories that draw you in and keep you there. I hope that all the people who read and loved Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity will give Evicted a chance.”
—Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto
“This devastating, fascinating book follows eight Milwaukee families on the edge of eviction. Desmond spent more than a year living with and among his subjects, and the result is a deeply personal documentation of what it means to have a roof over your head—and how so many of our fellow citizens deserve better.”
—Seattle Times
“I thought I had a sense of the breakdown and despair in America’s poorest communities. I didn’t… Searing… [and] critical.”
—Roger Altman, founder and chairman of Evercore and former United States Secretary of the Treasury; Wall Street Journal’s Best Books of 2016
“Like Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, this brilliant book is reportage with the depth and force of fiction. Its eye-opening details and data offer a new way to look at the affordable-housing crisis, the forces that perpetuate poverty and the policies we need to fix a crazily stacked deck.”
—MORE Magazine
"[Evicted] is harrowing, heartbreaking, and heavily researched, and the plight of the characters will remain with you long after you close the book's pages... Desmond's meticulousness shows how precision is not at odds with compassionate storytelling of the underprivileged. Indeed, [it] is the respect that Evicted shows for its characters' flaws and mistakes that makes the book impossible to forget."
—Christian Science Monitor
“A superb new book.”
—Nicholas Kristof, New York Times
"The poverty of others brings up terrible questions of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God and what if, were your circumstances or skin color or gender different, that could be you. Your gaze pulls away. But Desmond writes so powerfully and with such persuasive math that he turns your head back and keeps it there: Yes, it could be you. But if home is so crucial a place that its loss causes this much pain, Evicted argues, making it possible for more of us might change everything.”
—VICE
"Evicted is a rich, empathetic feat of storytelling and fieldwork."
—Mother Jones
"Evicted successfully interweaves the narratives of white characters living in a trailer park at the most southern point of Milwaukee with landlords and tenants in the sprawling black ghetto of the city’s North Side... Desmond’s book manages to be a deeply moral work, a successful nonfiction narrative, and a sweeping academic survey—all while bringing new research to his academic field and to the public’s attention."
—Slate
“I love books that devastate me… I won’t soon forget [Desmond’s] description of a family moving in and out of homeless shelters. [Evicted] was heartbreaking.”
—Imbolo Mbue, author of Behold the Dreamers; The Millions Best Books of 2016
“Evicted is that rare work that has something genuinely new to say about poverty. Desmond makes a convincing case that policymakers and academics have overlooked the role of the private rental market, and that eviction 'is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty'...Evictions have become routine. Desmond’s book should begin to change that."
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Matthew Desmond’s new book makes an undeniable case that we need to fix this all-American tragedy.”
—Huffington Post
"[A] carefully researched, often heartbreaking book."
—Chicago Tribune
"Evicted should provoke extensive public policy discussions. It is a magnificent, richly textured book with a Tolstoyan approach: telling it like it is but with underlying compassion and a respect for the humanity of each character, major or minor."
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Desmond intimately portrays both sides of the tenant-landlord divide with admirable balance and dry-eyed ethnographic discipline… Though it’s almost too painful to read, [Evicted is] also too important to ignore. Now what becomes of it is up to the rest of us.”
—Paste (Best Book of 2016)
"By immersing himself in the everyday lives of poor renters, Desmond follows in the tradition of James Agee, whose monumental 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men pounded the reader with clear-eyed and brutal descriptions of rural poverty in the Deep South."
—Minneapolis StarTribune
“Desmond seems to be that rare person who is a dedicated and careful researcher and a phenomenal writer. The stories he tells in Evicted are gripping and intimate, at the same time as compelling as a novel and painstakingly illustrating how people are trapped and what the systemic implications are of that. I literally could not put it down… [Evicted] feels like it has the potential to catalyze a movement.”
—Shelterforce
"[A] masterful, heartbreaking book… The stories in Evicted are a haunting plea for us to do the right thing by families who ache for the simple routines that build a life – evening baths in a working tub for the kids, dinner cooked in one’s own kitchen, windows and doors that keep cold and danger out, a place to call home.”
—Sojourner
“[An] unflinching, richly detailed narrative… Evicted is an important book that provides an unvarnished account of the lives of the troubled and disorganized – some would say vulnerable – poor. It is thick with detail … and represents a new installment in a tradition dating back to Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890)… One can find passages to admire on almost every page of Desmond’s book.”
—City Journal
“An intimate and beautiful work as poignant as it is insightful… Often you hear that an author writes well for an academic, as if he were being graded on a curve. But Desmond is a good writer, period. His prose is vivid and energetic; his physical descriptions can be small gems.”
—Bookforum
“A groundbreaking work… Desmond delivers a gripping, novelistic narrative… This stunning, remarkable book – a scholar’s 21st-century How the Other Half Lives – demands a wide audience.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Gripping storytelling and meticulous research undergird this outstanding ethnographic study… Desmond identifies affordable housing as a leading social justice issue of our time and offers concrete solutions to the crisis.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Highly recommended."
—Library Journal (starred)
"It’s hard to paint a slumlord as a sympathetic character, but Harvard professor Desmond manages to do so in this compelling look at home evictions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one of America’s most segregated cities... [Desmond] does a marvelous job telling these harrowing stories of people who find themselves in bad situations, shining a light on how eviction sets people up to fail... This is essential reading.”
—Booklist (starred)
“Evicted is astonishing—a masterpiece of writing and research that fills a tremendous gap in our understanding of poverty. Taking us into some of America’s poorest neighborhoods, Desmond illustrates how eviction leads to a cascade of events, often triggered by something as simple as a child throwing a snowball at a car, that can trap families in a cycle of poverty for years. Beautiful, harrowing, and deeply human, Evicted is a must read for anyone who cares about social justice in this country. I loved it.”
—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“This story is about one of the most basic human needs—a roof overhead—and yet Matthew Desmond has told it in sweeping, immersive, heartbreaking fashion. We enter the lives of both renters and landlords at shoulder height, experiencing their triumphs, struggles, cruelty, kindness, loss, and love. One hopes that Evicted will change public policy. It will certainly change how people respond to the world and those who inhabit it.”
—Jeff Hobbs, author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace
"This sensitive, achingly beautiful ethnography should refocus our understanding of poverty in America on the simple challenge of keeping a roof over your head."
—Robert D. Putnam, Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University, and author of Bowling Alone and Our Kids
"This is an extraordinary and crucial piece of work. Read it. Please, read it.”
—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family
“Matthew Desmond tells stories of people at their most vulnerable. The characters that populate this lyrical book, many of whom are women and children, are our true American heroes, showing great courage and mythic strength against forces that are much larger than the individual. Their stories are gripping and moving—tragic, too. It’s a wonder and a shame that here, in the most prosperous country in the world, a roof over one’s head can be elusive for so many.”
—Jesmyn Ward, author of Men We Reaped and Salvage the Bones
“Evicted is a striking account of a severe and rapidly developing form of economic hardship in the U.S. Matthew Desmond’s riveting narrative of the experiences of families in Milwaukee embroiled in the process of eviction will not only shock general readers, but it will broaden the perspective of experts on urban poverty as well. This powerful, well-written book also includes revealing portraits of profit-seeking landlords, as well as important findings from comprehensive surveys to back up the ethnographic research. Evicted is that rare book that both enlightens and serves as an urgent call for action.”
—William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University, and author of When Work Disappears
"Evicted paints a detailed and heartbreaking portrait of the country’s eviction problem, and how it feeds into a cycle of poverty."
—BuzzFeed
"Sociology’s next great hope… [Desmond] is positioned to intervene in the inequality debate in a big way.”
—Chronicle of Higher Education
"The extent of Desmond’s research is truly astonishing. More astonishing still is the fact that he’s able to condense all of his observations and data into a single nonfiction volume that is both unsettling and nearly impossible to put down."
—Chicago Review of Books
“Remarkable… [Desmond] has a novelist’s eye for the telling detail and a keen ear for dialogue… [His] book is a significant literary achievement, as well as a feat of reporting underpinned by statistical labour, with details provided in copious endnotes. It is eloquent, too, on the harm eviction does — not just to individuals but also to communities and to the quality of civic and urban life.”
—The Financial Times
“Desmond’s acute observational skills, his facility with reported dialogue and his ability to wrench chaotic stories into clear prose make Evicted a vivid, if sometimes grueling, read.”
—The Independent
“A monumental and vivid study of urban poverty in America… Evicted demands attention.”
—The Sunday Times
“By exposing the difficulties these families face in obtaining and keeping decent and affordable shelter, Desmond illuminates, as few others have recently done, the lives of America’s poor and, by extension, that of the country as a whole.”
—Times Literary Supplement
"This combination of novel, experience-driven academic research and reportage is part of what makes Evicted such a valuable contribution to non-fiction literature about the lived experience of poverty."
—Rabble
“Desmond, a young sociologist whose fieldwork in Milwaukee was the subject of ‘Disrupted Lives,’ this magazine’s January-February 2014 cover article, here details several of those lives in painful, novelistic detail. But it is all fact—and all twenty-first-century American.”
—Harvard Magazine
“Evicted is more than good journalism. While Desmond’s skill as a writer creates a narrative pull, his training as a sociologist forces him to ask why we haven’t had more data on perhaps our most pressing domestic crisis.”
—Christian Century
“[Evicted] could do more than anything written in years to get fixing welfare reform and addressing urban poverty back on the national agenda. It will be hard for anyone to read Evicted and not be outraged over this nation’s treatment of millions of low-income Americans. That is a huge accomplishment, and Desmond deserves high praise.”
—Beyond Chron
"Desmond shines as an ethnographer, providing rich description and engaging accounts of the daily struggles of people attempting to find some kind of stability amidst the chaos, powerlessness, and uncertainty of poverty... The combination of rigorous research and important policy recommendations makes this work valuable to a wide audience; it is a must-read.”
—Journal of Children and Poverty
“Evicted presents a passionate, intricately crafted argument that access to stable housing makes or breaks a person’s life. Desmond weaves these human stories together with years of additional research… to build a compelling case for drastic overhauls in how the country approaches public housing. He even offers a solution to the problem he describes.”
—Progressive Magazine
"For the two or three weeks I was reading this book, it formed my topic of conversation with friends, and at night, when I went to sleep, it filled my thoughts."
—Spectator
“Riveting… [the stories] bring to mind characters from Dickens and Steinbeck.”
—America Magazine
“Desmond does more than paint a haunting picture of the poverty and instability created by housing insecurity. He tears past market ideology to show the power of landlords and the way they decide who the city will work for and how… [A] masterpiece of sociological ethnography.”
—Dissent Magazine
"It is impossible to fully convey the subtlety and energy of [Evicted]... a tour de force."
—Books and Ideas
“A compelling and compassionate ethnography… [this book] demands being read cover to cover. Matthew Desmond’s Evicted is a moving, insightful, and deeply moral text that captures powerful, devastating scenes and draws much-needed attention to the brutal and beautiful lives at the intersection of American capitalism and poverty.”
—Sapiens
"Desmond's important book might set out practical prescriptions for solutions such as improving the size of the housing voucher program, but the deeply touching portraits are what really make Evicted the heavyweight that it is. It should be mandatory reading for everyone, especially politicians and others who walk the corridors of power. That such bruising poverty can exist in the world's richest country is a scathing indictment of our regulatory policies."
—Poornima Apte, BookBrowse.com
Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction Finalist
Winner of the 800-CEO-READ Book Award — Current Events & Public Affairs
Finalist for the American Bar Association's 2017 Silver Gavel Award
One of The Los Angeles Times' 10 Most Important Books of 2016
A New York Times Editors' Choice
One of Wall Street Journal's Hottest Spring Nonfiction Books
One of O: The Oprah Magazine's 10 Titles to Pick Up Now
One of Vulture's 8 Books You Need to Read This Month
One of BuzzFeed's 14 Most Buzzed About Books of 2016
One of The Guardian's Best Holiday Reads 2016
About the Author
Matthew Desmond is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and codirector of the Justice and Poverty Project. A former member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, he is the author of the award-winning book On the Fireline, coauthor of two books on race, and editor of a collection of studies on severe deprivation in America. His work has been supported by the Ford, Russell Sage, and National Science Foundations, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. In 2015, Desmond was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” grant.
Most helpful customer reviews
324 of 341 people found the following review helpful.
The 'Hood is Actually Not So Good
By MilwaukeeJoe
I have been involved with low income housing in Milwaukee for over three decades as a landlord and as an attorney for landlords and tenants. I know the neighborhoods and characters in this book all too well. If you want insight into poor people’s lives as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads, you should buy this book. The other reviews are right about how gripping those stories are. But if you are a graduate of Trump University and think you’ll get some insight into how to make obscene profits by renting to the poor you’ll find anecdotes but no real verified research about the business of landlording. Most significantly, you will not learn the truth that bringing evictions totally destroyed the rental business of Sherrena, the leading landlord protagonist.
Strangely, though Desmond interviewed 30 landlords he only focuses on two. One is Tobin, a mobile home park operator on Milwaukee’s south side, which is largely white and Hispanic. Tobin indeed makes a lot of money but that is because he does not have to maintain or repair 95% of the “dwellings” in his park. Tobin rents out a concrete slab with utility connections and the tenants buy or bring their own trailers and pay their own utilities. As owners they are responsible for the exterior and interior condition of their dwelling. Only 5% of the trailers are owned by the park and rented to tenants as a living unit. So Tobin is a landlord only in the sense that you might have a landlord this summer when you drive your Winnebago to a Jellystone Park and pay rent for the parking pad and utility hookups.
Then we have Sherrena who with her husband runs about 18 buildings (mostly two-family flats) in the African-American neighborhoods on the north side of Milwaukee. In a chapter titled “The ‘Hood is Good” Desmond blithely accepts Sherrena’s boast that she has a net worth of $2 million and nets $10,000 a month in rental income. Desmond is honest in portraying the many difficulties Sherrena has in collecting rent from her struggling tenants but he doesn’t do the background research (available from local court records) about the many thousands of dollars in unpaid rents and damaged units which sort of cut into profits a little bit.
As to her supposed net worth of $2 million, that averages out to $111,000 for each of these 18 ghetto properties - certainly far more than some of the real dumpy ones are worth – but the author does not research the amounts of the recorded mortgages against these properties (ranging between $64,000 and $119,200) which further greatly reduce the claimed net worth. That would have been revealed in the many foreclosures filed against Sherrena’s properties which started within a year after Desmond’s visit to Milwaukee.
So when this book came out in 2016 the curious reader might want to know: if the ‘hood is good for the landlord how much better has it gotten since the author did his study in 2009? Research so far shows that not one of Sherrena’s properties remains in her ownership. Starting in 2010 many were bulldozed, went into city ownership via foreclosure for nonpayment of real estate taxes or today sit as haunting, blighted eyesores. A few were foreclosed by lenders, were fixed up and are under new ownership.
Evictions by Sherrena ended in the year 2010. So did her non-existent profit. She joins many small-time under-capitalized landlords who have gone bust in Milwaukee and elsewhere since the Great Recession started in 2008 with the bursting of the housing bubble.
Please note that I still give the book 4 stars. Its significant defects in reporting on the “profit” aspect of its subtitle are outweighed by the important and detailed research on the effects of eviction in creating and perpetuating poverty. A better and expanded housing voucher program for low income tenants is much needed. Landlords nationwide should join Matt Desmond’s call for its implementation.
237 of 248 people found the following review helpful.
Eye opening
By G. Kellner
"Evicted" is the story of eight families in Milwaukee, WI--six families struggling mightily to pay the rent on their increasingly crappy apartments, and two sets of landlords. The landlords are either a new breed of venture capitalists or merely slumlords, depending on your perspective. Since roughly 2000, rents have shot up while the properties have either stayed the same or declined, so that by 2013 about one out of every three poor families spent seventy percent of their income on housing. Think about that for a minute.
As a result of this, poor families are always one crisis--really one unexpected expense--away from being evicted. The ramifications of being evicted on one's emotional, financial, and physical states are profound. First, once someone gets evicted, finding any kind of housing becomes extremely difficult--one of the ladies called 90 apartments before she found one that would take her and her two kids. You can place blame on these struggling families if you want to, but the fact of the matter is it's extraordinarily difficult for them to succeed, or even to just get by.
I found this book very interesting--to say I enjoyed it would be wrong because much of it is depressing. It made the problems of the urban poor personal. I quite liked some of them and I was rooting for them--"Please, let this landlord call her back!" I felt bad when Vanetta went to prison for armed robbery after her hours were cut, and I cheered when Scott finally got clean. I read it all the way through the endnotes, which are also quite interesting and provide some insights or background info. I really wanted to find out how all the families were doing today (the book takes place in 2008-2009) because I became attached to them and had come to care about them. Unfortunately the author doesn't tell you what became of them, although if I had to guess I'd say their lives continued on in more or less the same vein.
A word on the swearing: this is a well written, professionally done sociological study. The author only uses swears when he's quoting one of the people he interviewed. If you were desperate, poor, depressed and angry, you, too might be given to curse words.
If you enjoy sociological and/or cultural topics, if you care about equality in America, if you are interested in how grinding poverty affects families, pick this up. I learned a lot.
196 of 210 people found the following review helpful.
I Have Been there Myself....
By Steve J.
A difficult book to get through. Not that it was poorly written or boring just its subject matter was hard. And that is what made it so powerful. More real stories than boring analysis which is right up my alley. Statistics are fine but I want to know about the real people and their stories not just graphs and charts. I had a real rough patch 25 plus years ago and was very near what a lot of these people are going through. I know their fear, panic, depression, feeling of worthlessness first hand and that is what made this book an excellent read for me.
When I got my feet back on the ground and bought my first house we used to have a mail box right out front. At the end of the month I used to write my check for my mortgage at night when I did my bills and go to the mailbox and put it in. I used to look up at the stars, close my eyes, and thank God that I had a place to stay for another 30 days. Although many years have past the scars of that time never left me and never will and I am glad. A reminder of what could happen. All of these people have my sympathy because I have been there myself.
Powerful and relevant-well worth the time.
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