What does it mean to have a home, an address, or a hearth? While witnessing displacement and the desperate seek for refuge abroad, should we reflect on domestic insecurity? Matthew Desmond’s 2016 book Evicted: Poverty and Profits in the American City, is an ethnography, or journalistic fieldwork, of the teetering edge of homelessness and the revolving door of rentals that many low-income American families face. Set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Desmond follows eight families that struggled to make rent during The Great Recession, a financial crisis that occurred from 2007 to 2008. While Evicted is non-fiction, Desmond’s observational storytelling and interviewing process of temporary residents of trailer parks and rentals characterize the stats in that I was almost forced to witness rather than gaze at the epidemic of homelessness. Contextualizing the daily narrative of poor renters and just-surviving landlords, Desmond rips open the stereotypes of good vs. evil and victim vs. oppressor to reveal a cycle of poverty that condemns both sides.
Desmond, a sociologist and professor at Princeton University, is the principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, which conducted the Milwaukee Area Renters Study (MARS) from 2009 to 2011. MARS was an original survey of over 1,000 renters collecting data on housing, residential mobility, and eviction to paint the statistical picture of American urban poverty and served as the factual skeleton to the gut-wrenching storytelling of Evicted. Based on eight separate experiences within the rental system, Desmond focuses on Milwaukee’s predominantly Black inner-city North Side and a predominantly white mobile home park on the South Side to demonstrate how eviction and housing instability are, in some ways, a great equalizer.
Desmond embeds himself in the communities he studies and, more importantly, witnesses by living at these locations for a total of six months, literally like a fly on the wall. He uses objective narration with intense descriptions of the renters’ daily routines and mannerisms to describe the cascade of evictions each family has faced and will face. Arleen Bell, one of the eight families, weighs the remnants of her welfare check in which 88% of the funds had gone to rent, not including utilities, as one of her three sons requires costly medication to treat his severe asthma, and her check gets cut the following month per policy for missing a welfare appointment. During the height of the winter months, with Christmas approaching, Arleen’s landlord feels pressure to follow up on late dues to bring apartment lots up to code before her buildings get foreclosed — Arleen receives that cut in the form of another eviction notice that will blacken her housing score for the next ten years, reducing the likelihood of landing another rental unit.
Why would I recommend a book where you know the “main characters” face David and Goliath, and the worst part is that the situation is an urban reality? Honestly, I can’t find anything more convincing than to simply witness and question conveniently numbing archetypes, although the root institutional cause of the vicious cycle of homelessness is looming. Before coming to Hoboken, the homeless population remained just a “population” as my very suburban cookie-cutter hometown worked to remove homelessness from the public eye in the greater Hoboken scene has transformed my understanding of the homeless as a community that often relies on social relationships. Evicted’s narrativization of homelessness challenges previous misconceptions about both renters and the “looming” landlords to reserve curiosity for the baggage a home can represent to individuals and humanitarian efforts at large.
