He also details the housing conditions that many residents with histories of evictions are forced to cope with for fear of being evicted again.

For more than a year, he shadowed two landlords and several tenants to capture intimate portraits of the circumstances, court hearings, and personal challenges that lead up to, and followed, the eviction process.ĭesmond shows evictions from both sides: He illuminates the reasoning and tactics used to remove tenants from their homes, those that seem both sensible and dubious. Desmond spent time living in a trailer park where residents were threatened with a mass eviction, and in a rooming house on Milwaukee’s North side.

In his new book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard and McArthur Genius grant recipient, follows the lives of landlords and tenants in some of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods. Why Blacks and Hispanics Have Such Expensive Mortgages.Why Gender Inequality Is More Acute for Women in the South.And as rents climb in many American cities, evictions are becoming more and more commonplace.

But while spectators may soon forget the disturbing scene, an eviction can haunt a tenant, and their family, for years: The psychological, legal, and financial damage inflicted by the process makes it difficult to find new housing, or to keep a job, or provide a stable education for children. An eviction can be extremely unsettling, with a family’s most personal effects-clothes, furniture, children’s toys-piled on street corners or hastily packed into trucks or cars.

Evicted poverty and profit