Responses to Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
Evicted: The Socio-Legal Case for the Right to Housing
Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a triumphant work that provides the missing socio-legal data needed to prove why America should recognize housing as a human right. Desmond’s masterful study of the effect of evictions on Milwaukee’s urban poor in the wake of the 2008 U.S. housing crisis humanizes the evicted, and their landlords, through rich and detailed ethnographies. His intimate portrayals teach Evicted’s readers about the agonizingly difficult choices that low-income, unsubsidized tenants must make in the private rental market. Evicted also reveals the contradictions between “law on the books” and “law-in-action." Its most significant contribution to American housing and poverty scholarship is the socio-legal data it provides to demonstrate the high economic and social costs America pays for its failure to consider housing a basic human right. Indeed, Desmond ultimately calls for an American right to housing and presents law and policy solutions in Evicted to advance such a right.
Legal Responses to the Crisis of Forced Moves Illustrated in Evicted
Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City combines compelling narratives that illustrate many of the barriers to housing for individuals in poverty with quantitative data that speaks to the scope of the housing crisis in urban America. This Essay addresses what may be a lawyer’s most natural question upon finishing Desmond’s book: what can lawyers and the law do to reduce evictions and forced moves among tenants in poverty?
Exploiting the Poor: Housing, Markets, and Vulnerability
Matthew Desmond’s magisterial Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is arguably the most important book about poverty in the United States in a generation. Just as Michael Harrington’s The Other America provided the country with a necessary window onto the poverty lurking below the surface of the affluent society of post-war America, so too Evicted brings to life the immense challenges and hardships of poverty in today’s economy. Desmond’s empathetic descriptions of the lives of poor individuals and families facing eviction and homelessness in two Milwaukee neighborhoods force readers to confront the inhumanity of society’s choice to not treat housing as a basic right.