September 2021
Evicted
Synopsis
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a 2016 non-fiction book by American author Matthew Desmond. Set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the book follows eight families struggling to pay rent to their landlords during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Desmond's goal in the book is to highlight the issues of extreme poverty, affordable housing, and economic exploitation in the United States. Evicted was well-received and won multiple book awards such as the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. The Pulitzer committee selected the book "for a deeply researched exposé that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty."
Reviews
-
Evicted landed with me in part because it was told through the stories of people. It is numbing to read about housing problems by numbers. When told through the stories of real people you see a system that is broken with poor incentive structures. It doesn't give the answer (although there is a small attempt at the end), but it does tell the story and does it beautifully.
-
Related reading
Loved this one?