Reading Order
Evicted Reading Order
Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016) follows eight Milwaukee families — four white, four Black, living in the poorest parts of the city — through the experience of eviction, based on nearly two years Desmond spent living in a trailer park and a rooming house taking ethnographic notes. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Evicted argues that eviction is not simply a consequence of poverty but a cause of it — a mechanism that perpetuates disadvantage and enriches a small class of landlords at the expense of the city's most vulnerable residents.
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Evicted
Complete Evicted Book List
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Evicted
Matthew Desmond·2016·The complete standalone work. Read alongside The New Jim Crow (Michelle Alexander) for the full picture of how the criminal justice and housing systems work together to perpetuate racial poverty in American cities.
Evicted — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Desmond's methodology in Evicted?
Evicted is based on two years of participant-observation ethnography that Matthew Desmond conducted between 2008 and 2009 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He lived first in a predominantly white trailer park on the north side of the city, then in a rooming house in the predominantly Black inner city — taking notes, attending court hearings, accompanying landlords and tenants through evictions, and following eight focal families through their experiences of housing insecurity and eviction. The methodology is deeply embedded in the tradition of sociological ethnography that includes William Foote Whyte's Street Corner Society (1943) and Elliot Liebow's Tally's Corner (1967), but Desmond combines the ethnographic account with statistical analysis to make arguments about the structural causes and consequences of eviction that go beyond the individual stories. A methodological appendix at the back of the book is itself a remarkable piece of writing about the ethics and practice of participant observation.
What is Desmond's argument about eviction and poverty?
The conventional account of eviction assumes that people are evicted because they are poor and cannot pay their rent — eviction is a consequence of poverty. Desmond's argument reverses this: eviction is not only a consequence of poverty but a cause of it. Eviction costs families their possessions (which must be abandoned or moved on short notice, often by strangers hired by landlords), their addresses (which they need for employment applications and benefit eligibility), their neighborhoods (children must change schools, adults lose their networks), and their credit histories (eviction records make it difficult or impossible to rent again from most landlords). Eviction also enriches a class of inner-city landlords who have low acquisition costs, minimal maintenance obligations, and a steady supply of tenants with no better options — the Milwaukee landlords Desmond follows make profits that dwarf those of landlords in wealthier neighborhoods. The book thus reframes poverty as something that is actively produced by the housing market rather than simply experienced within it.
How does race factor into Evicted's account of eviction?
Evicted documents how eviction falls disproportionately on Black women with children: in Milwaukee, Black women in poor neighborhoods were evicted at twice the rate of white women in comparable situations, and this racial disparity was not explained by differences in income or family size. Desmond traces this disparity to a combination of factors: discrimination in housing voucher use (landlords in white neighborhoods refusing vouchers), the concentration of the poorest housing stock in Black neighborhoods, and the specific combination of single motherhood and racialized poverty that makes Black women the most vulnerable group in the urban housing market. The book is ultimately about how poverty and racial disadvantage are produced and reproduced through ordinary market mechanisms — rent, eviction, profit — rather than only through the more dramatic mechanisms of police violence and mass incarceration that dominate conversations about racial inequality.
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