Evicted

Poverty and Profit in the American City

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Matthew Desmond: Evicted (2016, Penguin Books, Limited)

English language

Published 2016 by Penguin Books, Limited.

ISBN:
978-0-241-26087-6
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5 stars (2 reviews)

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a 2016 non-fiction book by American author Matthew Desmond. Set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the book follows eight families struggling to pay rent to their landlords during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Desmond's goal in the book is to highlight the issues of extreme poverty, affordable housing, and economic exploitation in the United States.

Evicted was well-received and won multiple book awards such as the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. The Pulitzer committee selected the book "for a deeply researched exposé that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty."

9 editions

Review of 'Evicted' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

This is one of the most depressing books I've read recently (and I've read a lot of depressing non-fiction.) But it's an important read - I really recommend it.

He follows a number of people in Milwaukee, WI to look at how poverty makes housing uncertain, and how evictions make things so much worse. He follows tenants as well as landlords. You get a peek into how they live their daily lives.

It is so clear how the incentives, both for tenants and landlords, are such that people are continually stuck in a cycle of sub-standard housing, evictions, and homelessness. And the timing and setting doesn't even address the issues that arise when housing is as expensive it is in some coastal cities. There are simple solutions to this problem - solutions we know are unlikely to be politically possible in this country.

Anyway, it's a really well written, engaging, …