This uneven distribution of wealth is exactly what I hate about our current system and why it doesn't work.

 

 

 Tobin (the landlord) took home roughly $447,000 each year. He belonged to the top 1 percent of income earners. Most of his tenants belonged to the bottom 10 percent.

It used to be a rarity, for other individuals used to fight to protect each other as law enforcement attempted to throw someone out onto the street for failure to pay their rent but now, eviction has become a common sight. The implications of this normality have major implications and Matthew Desmond did an excellent job of showing how eviction has shaped our society and changed individuals in his new novel, Evicted. I had to read this novel over a couple days as I needed time to digest the information, for Desmond drove headfirst into this assignment as he followed eight families in Milwaukee and lived among his subjects for this novel. He lived with them, spoke directly with them, spoke with their landlords, and took thousands of pages of notes before even attempting to write this novel.

I saw this relationship as a game. The tenants are trying to find the cheapest places to live and the landlords are trying to give them cheap places and what they both found in the long run is not what they visualized. For tenants, other needs and wants cropped up as they lived their lives and they took priority over their rent causing their rent to fall behind. If something in the apartment is/got broken, they tried to withhold rent until it was fixed. Sometimes the tenants fell farther and farther behind on their rent, they were digging themselves into a hole. For landlords, the bills must get paid on the property and the tenant had promised to pay the rent when they moved in. Eviction was a way to get someone else in there to pay the rent. This was a vicious cycle for some tenants as they moved from place to place. The landlords seemed to know the loopholes in the system, they knew how to work around things and it burned me how they treated some of their tenants. Where were the tenants’ rights?

Sometimes landlords would tell the tenants what was wrong with the apartment before renting it out, leading the tenants to believe that it would be fixed but the landlord knew better. The amount of applications that individuals would fill out to try to find housing was absurd, sometimes even lying, showed just how desperate and awful this situation had become. The stories inside this novel broke my heart, the way the families were split apart because they didn’t have the means to support them. Children uprooted from schools, from their family and from their support system over and over again. Thinking about the mental, health and psychological welfare of these individuals was just overwhelming. Will history repeat itself? Desmond talks about his emotions while writing this novel, how it affected him and how it changed him. Desmond offers suggestions on how we can change this issue and the future of eviction as he sees it. I feel that everything is linked and you can definitely see this in this novel. This novel is powerful, I am thankful for Desmond’s work and I am thankful that wrote this novel. This is one amazing read, one that moved me and a novel that I will be opening up again. I highly recommend it.
I won a copy of this novel from Crown Publishing and Read It Forward in the Silent Book Club Sweepstakes.

Evictions in the U.S. used to be rare events, drawing crowds of protesters. But these days, for low-income renters, evictions are commonplace; housing courts exist to process nothing else, while many more people are forced to move without ever going to court. But eviction can have long-term consequences; it becomes harder and harder to find new housing, and people are forced to accept poorer options, along with potentially losing their personal belongings. Those who have been evicted are more likely to suffer depression even years later.

This book follows eight or so Milwaukee tenants and families facing eviction, as well as two major landlords: one, the owner of a notorious trailer park on the white side of town (Milwaukee being a particularly segregated city), the other the owner of a number of properties in the black inner city. The tenants are a diverse lot, but they are uniformly dysfunctional, whether they’re picking fights, addicted to drugs, spending limited funds unwisely, missing welfare appointments, or deciding in a moment of desperation to mug someone for rent money. This is not a book for the judgmental reader (for that, I suggest Two Dollars a Day, which is an excellent complement to this one whether you’re judgmental or not). That said, it works, because the author’s point isn’t that the tenants are blameless. It’s that everyone, no matter how undesirable as a tenant, has to live somewhere. And while a stable home can be a base for someone to get their life together or begin recovering from addiction or trauma, having none is likely to exacerbate their problems and may send them into a downward spiral.

Evictions aside, though, housing for low-income people in the U.S. is a mess. Only about a third of those who qualify for housing assistance receive it, due to lack of funds. This means everybody else is on their own, which can mean spending most or all of their income on rent. Low-income housing isn’t actually much cheaper (if at all) than middle-income housing – just less selective and in much poorer condition.

Desmond deals with all this through the stories of the tenants, which after a slow start (I was about 100 pages in before becoming sure I’d finish) become quite compelling. You can’t help but feel bad for these messed-up people and their poor kids. And the stories do an excellent job of illustrating the problems low-income tenants face, as they spend their days searching frantically for housing, only to lose it – sometimes for good reason, sometimes not. This will be an eye-opener for a lot of readers and I’m glad to see it getting the attention it deserves.

Interestingly, the book spends a fair amount of time on the landlords’ point-of-view, but they never become sympathetic. They are oddly open about their moneymaking schemes: for instance, Tobin, the absentee owner of the trailer park, uses the “Handyman Special,” meaning he gives away the trailers, then charges tenants $500 a month in “lot rent” (for the land the trailer is on). This makes the tenants, as owners of the trailers, responsible for all upkeep and repairs, but ownership gets them nowhere because, if evicted from the land, they lack the money to move the trailers (even if they’re worth enough to move) or anyplace to move them to. So he gets to reclaim them as “abandoned property” and start all over with new tenants. Meanwhile Sherrena, the inner-city landlady, seems to have really opened up to the author, but it’s not a pretty picture: she files spiteful evictions against people who’ve offended her to make their housing search more difficult, and complains that tenants with nowhere to go are “selfish” for not moving out faster. Even the attempts to humanize her by showing her personal life backfire; she enjoys eating out, vacations in Florida and Jamaica, and gambling, i.e., living large off the desperate people whose stories comprise the majority of the book.

While much of this book is broadly applicable to the U.S., though, it would have benefited from more research into areas outside of Milwaukee. Some of these Wisconsin laws and practices are jaw-droppingly bad (and let’s just say I’m not comparing it to California). In Wisconsin, apparently, evicted tenants are given no advance notice of when the sheriffs will come to padlock them out, and movers come along to dump their stuff out on the spot, rather than allowing tenants time to return and collect it. Tenants are given separate court dates for the eviction itself and to determine the amount of money owned (unsurprisingly, hardly anybody shows up for the second one). And police departments pressure landlords – through threats of fines and even imprisonment – to evict anyone who is a “nuisance,” meaning anyone who calls the police a lot. Even if it’s for very good reason, such as the caller or their neighbor being a victim of domestic violence. One landlord in the book gives a tenant a hard time for calling 911 when her child has an asthma attack, while others post signs telling tenants not to call the police. In emergencies. I cannot get my head around this and can only hope someone sues this police department into oblivion – because what use are police if they’re forcing people to decide between eviction and calling for help in emergencies? How can this do anything but make the city more dangerous?

Okay, more on the police thing. When the Milwaukee PD gets three calls in a month from any one address, they force the landlord to come up with a plan to address the “nuisance,” and eviction seems to be the only plan they accept. One landlord, in a letter I can only hope was written in a subtle attempt to shame the department, wrote: “First, we are evicting Sheila M, the caller for help from police. She has been beaten by her ‘man’ who kicks in doors and goes to jail for 1 or 2 days. (Catch and release does not work.) We suggested she obtain a gun and kill him in self-defense, but evidently she hasn’t. Therefore, we are evicting her.” Any intended irony went right over the police’s heads, though. The response? “This notice serves to inform you that your written course of action is accepted.”

Anyway, this is a good book, and you should read it. Maybe only when you are ready to be outraged. But the author did an excellent job and I hope people pay attention.

I received an advance reader's edition of this book through The Reading Room in exchange for an honest review.

This was a powerful and eye-opening ethnography of eviction and poverty in Milwaukee. The bulk of the book follows various people, from landlords to tenants, and reveals the hardships and inequalities of housing in America.

Each story was very personal and the reader really gets a feel for Desmond's closeness to his subject matter. I felt myself rooting for the people in the book as I read about their journeys and despairing as they faces roadblock after roadblock.

I really liked the way Desmond combated many popular myths about poverty in cities such as what people buy with food stamps (it's not lobster every night), why it's so difficult to stay clean and sober when facing eviction and homelessness, what poor people spend their money on and why you might see poor people with nice things, as well as why it is so difficult to keep a job when you have been evicted.

While each story was very powerful and interspersed with important facts, I felt a little confused by the overall organization and structure. Instead of being broken down by theme or individual person, the book jumped from person to person, which often made it difficult for me to keep all of the information straight and I would forget some of the important details that has previously transpired in other sections of the book.

Also, the stories felt very hopeless and overwhelming for the most part, which I get is the point, but the real message of the book for me came in the epilogue when Desmond proposed how we can fix things and regarded affordable housing as a basic human right. I think the book would have been easier for me to understand and digest if such suggestions were included throughout the book instead of just at the end or if an analysis of themes followed the stories that demonstrated them. The epilogue really summed up the important message of the inequality and exploitation in housing that is detailed in the book and suggested a plan to make things better.

Overall, a very good book that has an important message of the significance of affordable housing and why America has failed so many of its citizens. This is an essential book for all Americans to read, because not only does it demonstrate what is wrong with American housing, but it also gives a voice to a huge section of the American population that is often ignored because of their circumstances. This book gives a look at the lives of real human beings who deserve basic human rights, which should include a habitable place to live.