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A review by morgan_blackledge
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
5.0
Home is where we can be ourselves. It’s where we play, learn and develop as children and restore as adults. Community is where we work, socialize and procure our basic necessities.
What does it do to a family to be forcibly evicted, to loose everything, to leave your community behind, for children to switch schools and to start all over, only to do it again a few months or even a few weeks later. For the families in this book, this is a chronically reoccurring ordeal.
Evicted focuses on low income housing in the Milwaukee area, and describes a cycle of poverty, and what amounts to legally sanctioned usury, that ensnares tenant and landlord alike in vicious trap with little to no hope of escape.
The landlords described in the text are entrepreneurial and upwardly mobile African American people who discover a business opportunity available to rental property owners in low income zones.
Essentially, the profit margins for landlords of lower value properties is MUCH higher than for those of higher value properties. They pay less for the property in the first place, and frequently invest much less in maintenance of the properties, and charge close to the same rent.
These landlords commonly engage in brutal (however legal) tactics to extract their rent money from their chronically poor tenants. Many of whom are disabled, elderly, addicted and/or single mother renters, who often have to chose between paying utilities, or buying groceries, and paying rent.
These landlords are not villainous. They are themselves attempting to “bootstrap” their way out of that same poverty as their tenants. They are however stepping on the heads of the less fortunate in order to climb that greased ladder of American upward mobility.
One of the most disturbing revelations concerns changes in Wisconsin legislation that put the onus of evicting “problem” households on to landlords.
Essentially, if the police had been called to a given household on multiple occasions within a given timeframe, the police department would issue citations to the landlords to either rectify the problem, or evict the tenant, or receive fines.
On the surface, this might make sense. But in practice, the policy lead to chronic under reporting of issues such as rape and domestic violence from the tenants, out of fear that police involvement would result in their being evicted.
This book, in combination with books like the New Jim Crow, and the Least Of Us, paint a portrait of American poverty enflamed by addiction and aggressive, racist incarceration that is heartbreaking, shocking and utterly disturbing.
What does it do to a family to be forcibly evicted, to loose everything, to leave your community behind, for children to switch schools and to start all over, only to do it again a few months or even a few weeks later. For the families in this book, this is a chronically reoccurring ordeal.
Evicted focuses on low income housing in the Milwaukee area, and describes a cycle of poverty, and what amounts to legally sanctioned usury, that ensnares tenant and landlord alike in vicious trap with little to no hope of escape.
The landlords described in the text are entrepreneurial and upwardly mobile African American people who discover a business opportunity available to rental property owners in low income zones.
Essentially, the profit margins for landlords of lower value properties is MUCH higher than for those of higher value properties. They pay less for the property in the first place, and frequently invest much less in maintenance of the properties, and charge close to the same rent.
These landlords commonly engage in brutal (however legal) tactics to extract their rent money from their chronically poor tenants. Many of whom are disabled, elderly, addicted and/or single mother renters, who often have to chose between paying utilities, or buying groceries, and paying rent.
These landlords are not villainous. They are themselves attempting to “bootstrap” their way out of that same poverty as their tenants. They are however stepping on the heads of the less fortunate in order to climb that greased ladder of American upward mobility.
One of the most disturbing revelations concerns changes in Wisconsin legislation that put the onus of evicting “problem” households on to landlords.
Essentially, if the police had been called to a given household on multiple occasions within a given timeframe, the police department would issue citations to the landlords to either rectify the problem, or evict the tenant, or receive fines.
On the surface, this might make sense. But in practice, the policy lead to chronic under reporting of issues such as rape and domestic violence from the tenants, out of fear that police involvement would result in their being evicted.
This book, in combination with books like the New Jim Crow, and the Least Of Us, paint a portrait of American poverty enflamed by addiction and aggressive, racist incarceration that is heartbreaking, shocking and utterly disturbing.