Evicted by Matthew Desmond

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond is a heartbreakingly sad book based on ethnographic research Desmond did about eviction in Milwaukee.

This book made me so, so, so unhappy.  I live 50 miles from this place and I had no idea that any of this was going on. I mean, I know that there are people who live in poverty, but I didn't fully understand just how common evictions have become.

I know poverty. I come from poverty* and I clawed my way through luck and some advantageous use of governmental resources.

But.

This book.

The housing crisis has created a real problem for renters. People who had owned homes but lost them became renters and low-income renters were then pushed into ever more substandard rentals.  They can't afford to move, they can't afford to complain about living conditions because the landlords will evict them, and the landlords know they can't move, so they don't fix anything.  If landlords do start eviction proceedings, the buildup of fines, fees, and the destruction of your credit and rental history makes it impossible to dig out from debt.

This book follows some families in Milwaukee who deal with poverty, addiction, eviction, and mental illness. It follows families whose children die, whose children are removed from their parents' custody, and whose children grow up quickly.  It follows white families and black families. it follows landlords/slumlords. It takes us into the bowels of the social services and criminal justice systems. It does all this with sympathy for all.

Why does a person spend all their food stamps on one dinner of lobster tail and eat ramen for the rest of the month? Why does a person who is college educated and once made upwards of six figures end up in a beat up trailer with no hot water and no mattress to sleep on? How do children do their homework when there are eight other people in a two bedroom apartment with them? You learn all of this and, if you're anything like me, you get a knot in your stomach.  The world is hard for all of us, but much harder for some.

It was a good reminder for me. I have slacked off on much of my volunteer work in the last few years. For many years, it was something that really and truly identified who I was. It was an important part of my identity - someone who spent much time and effort volunteering and being part of a solution to problems, but I haven't really found my niche in the volunteer world here in Wisconsin. But there's work to be done and I can't throw my hands up in the air and say it's out of my control, so I need to buckle down. I can't help every one of those people, but I can some.

Edited to add: Rural poverty is quite different from urban poverty. That is part of the reason why some of this book was so revealing to me.