Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Key Takeaways

• Eviction is a cause of poverty, not just a symptom. Desmond’s central inversion: losing a home doesn’t merely follow from being poor, it actively manufactures and deepens poverty — costing renters their jobs, their belongings, their neighborhoods, and their kids’ stability. “Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.” The loop runs both ways: job loss triggers eviction, and eviction triggers job loss. See Poverty.

• There is a business model at the bottom of every market — and the ‘hood is good. The book’s moral and analytic engine is exploitation, not just deprivation. We fixate on what poor communities lack (jobs, safety nets, role models) and overlook how much money is extracted from them. Landlords like Sherrena, payday lenders, and rent-to-own stores all run the same play: profit excessively from people with no other option. Connects to Capitalism and the extraction theme in The Man Who Broke Capitalism.

• Eviction is gendered and racialized the way incarceration is. “Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.” In Milwaukee’s poorest black neighborhoods, 1 woman renter in 17 was evicted each year. Even landlords who applied “the same standards to everyone” reproduced inequality, because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted — so neutral criminal/eviction screens fell hardest on African Americans. Meanwhile Pam and Ned, with worse records, were approved “because they were white.” Ties to Income Inequality and Racial Segregation.

• The ghetto is social design, not accident. “The poor did not crowd into slums because of cheap housing… simply because they were allowed to be.” Concentrated poverty wasn’t a by-product of industrialization but “a prime moneymaker for those who saw ripe opportunity in land scarcity, housing dilapidation, and racial segregation.” Landlord screening practices distribute advantage and disadvantage block by block — even address by address. See City Building.

• Most poor renters get nothing. “Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.” Welfare stipends froze ($20.65/day) while housing costs soared, so the typical poor family — like Arleen — has no voucher and no public housing, just the private market at the bottom.

• Poverty makes “irrational” choices rational. “Larraine threw money away because she was poor,” not the reverse. When the distance from grinding to stable poverty is unbridgeable no matter how many pennies you pinch, small pleasures — a TV, lobster on food stamps, a steak — are a way “to season the suffering.” A direct study in Scarcity.

• The fix is a universal housing voucher — and it’s affordable now. Every family below an income line gets a voucher, pays 30% of income toward a decent, fairly-priced home, and landlords must participate (no discriminating against voucher holders). Pair it with rent regulation so landlords can’t overcharge — economists argue the existing program could cover every poor family in America without additional spending if overcharging were curbed. “If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.” Affordable housing reframed as a Human Capital investment; resonates with the cash-transfer case in Utopia For Realists.

• Ultimately it’s a moral question. “Do we believe that the right to a decent home is part of what it means to be an American?” Desmond rejects the liberal “structural forces” vs. conservative “individual deficiency” binary — both “treated low-income families as if they lived in quarantine.” Stable housing is the precondition for the kind of citizenship Alexis de Tocqueville described: you engage with the public realm only once you see a street as your street.

Connections

• Nickel & Dimed — Ehrenreich’s ground-level immersion in low-wage America is Desmond’s nearest cousin in method and message: working full-time still doesn’t lift you out, and the people studied are treated as protagonists, not data points.
• Utopia For Realists — Bregman’s case for UBI and cash transfers is the macro version of Desmond’s micro proposal; both argue poverty is fundamentally an absence of cash/resources, not of character, and both insist the money already exists.
• Universal Basic Income — Desmond’s universal housing voucher is a housing-specific analogue: an unconditional floor that every family below an income line receives, scaled to 30% of income, reframing poverty as a resource problem the existing budget can already solve.
• Real Estate — Sherrena’s “Why real estate?” — “long-term residuals,” “property being the best investment out there” — exposes the asset class as the extraction engine at the bottom of the housing market, where neglecting repairs and limiting appliances maximizes return on the poorest tenants.
• Poor Economics — A Radical Rethinking of The Way To Fight Global Poverty — Banerjee and Duflo’s question — why do the poor make choices that look irrational? — is answered identically here: Larraine “throws money away because she is poor.” Both refuse to read the behavior of the poor as the cause of their poverty.
• Hillbilly Elegy — a useful foil. Vance leans on the cultural/individual-deficiency explanation Desmond explicitly names and rejects; reading them together stages the exact “structural vs. individual” debate Desmond says misses the point.
• The Man Who Broke Capitalism — shares the extraction lens: profit maximized at the expense of the vulnerable, “a business model at the bottom of every market.”

Highlights

• “Eviction’s fallout is severe. Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street. It invites depression and illness, compels families to move into degrading housing in dangerous neighborhoods, uproots communities, and harms children. Eviction reveals people’s vulnerability and desperation, as well as their ingenuity and guts.”
• “Sherrena nodded reassuringly and said, almost to herself, ‘I guess I got to stop feeling sorry for these people because nobody is feeling sorry for me. Last time I checked, the mortgage company still wanted their money.’”
• “When people asked, ‘Why real estate?’ Sherrena would reply with some talk about ‘long-term residuals’ or ‘property being the best investment out there.’ But there was more to it. Sherrena shared something with other landlords: an unbending confidence that she could make it on her own without a school or a company to fall back on, without a contract or a pension or a union. She had an understanding with the universe that she could strike out into nothing and through her own gumption and intelligence come back with a good living.”
• “When she moved onto Thirteenth Street, Arleen was receiving W-2 T, owing mainly to her chronic depression. She received the same stipend in 2008 that she would have when welfare was reformed a decade earlier: $20.65 a day, $7,536 a year. Since 1997, welfare stipends in Milwaukee and almost everywhere else have not budged even as housing costs have soared. For years, politicians have known that families could not survive on welfare alone. This was the case before rent and utility costs climbed through the 2000s and it was even more true afterward.”
• “Most poor people in America were like Arleen: they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.”
• “The public peace — the sidewalk and street peace — of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by the intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.” (Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
• “The poor did not crowd into slums because of cheap housing. They were there — and this was especially true of the black poor — simply because they were allowed to be.”
• “The truth was that Doreen and Patrice didn’t expect much from Malik (who had just gotten their daughter/sister pregnant), not because of anything he had done, but because of their own experience with men… Doreen and Patrice did not see why a man needed to be involved in family decisions about where to raise a child, let alone what to name it.”
• “The small act of screening could have big consequences. From thousands of yes/no decisions emerged a geography of advantage and disadvantage that characterized the modern American city: good schools and failing ones, safe streets and dangerous ones. Landlords were major players in distributing the spoils. They decided who got to live where. And their screening practices (or lack thereof) revealed why crime and gang activity or an area’s civic engagement and its spirit of neighborliness could vary drastically from one block to the next. They also helped explain why on the same block in the same low-income neighborhood, one apartment complex but not another became familiar to the police.”
• “Screening practices that banned criminality and poverty in the same stroke drew poor families shoulder to shoulder with drug dealers, sex offenders, and other lawbreakers in places with lenient requirements. Neighborhoods marred by high poverty could incite crime, and crime could invite poverty, but also because the techniques landlords used to ‘keep illegal and destructive activity out of rental property’ kept poverty out as well. This also meant that violence, drug activity, deep poverty, and other social problems coalesced at a much smaller, more acute level than the neighborhood. They gathered at the same address.”
• “Some landlords neglected to screen tenants for the same reason payday lenders offered unsecured, high-interest loans to families with unpaid debt or lousy credit; for the same reason that the subprime industry gave mortgages to people who could not afford them; for the same reason Rent-A-Center allowed you to take home a new Hisense air conditioner or Klaussner ‘Lazarus’ reclining sofa without running a credit check. There was a business model at the bottom of every market.”
• “In Milwaukee’s poorest black neighborhoods, eviction had become commonplace — especially for women. In those neighborhoods, 1 female renter in 17 was evicted through the court system every year, which was twice as often as women from the city’s poorest white areas. Women from black neighborhoods made up 9 percent of Milwaukee’s population and 30 percent of its evicted tenants.”
• “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”
• “For the chronically and desperately poor whose credit was already wrecked, a docketed judgment was just another shove deeper into the pit. But for the tenant who went on to land a decent job or marry and then take another tentative step forward, applying for student loans or purchasing a first home — for that tenant, it was a real barrier on the already difficult road to self-reliance and security.”
• “When the move was done, the crew gathered by the trucks, instinctively stomping the ground to shake loose any stowaway roaches. Those who smoked reached for their packs. They didn’t know where the children would go, and they didn’t ask.”
• “Asking for help from better-off kin was complicated. Those ties were banked, saved for emergency situations or opportunities to get ahead. People were careful not to overdraw their account because when family members with money grew exhausted by repeated requests, they sometimes withheld support for long periods of time, pegging their relatives’ misfortunes to individual failings. This was one reason why family members in the best position to help were often not asked to do so.”
• “Hispanic and African American neighborhoods had been targeted by the subprime lending industry: renters were lured into buying bad mortgages, and homeowners were encouraged to refinance under riskier terms. Then it all came crashing down. Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11 percent reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31 percent of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent.”
• “Pastor Daryl felt torn. On the one hand, he thought it was the job of the church, not the government, to care for the poor and the hungry. That, to him, was ‘pure Christianity.’ When it came to Larraine, though, Pastor Daryl believed a lot of hardship was self-inflicted. ‘She made some stupid choices, spending her money foolishly… Making her go without for a while may be the best thing for her, so that she can be reminded, ‘Hey when I make foolish choices there are consequences.” It was easy to go on about helping ‘the poor.’ Helping a poor person with a name, a face, a history, and many needs, a person whose mistakes and lapses of judgement you have recorded — that was a more trying matter.”
• “Lamar’s labor was cheap, but he knew there were better deals to be had. When the plumbing broke, the roof leaked, or rooms needed painting, savvy inner-city landlords did not phone plumbers, roofers, or painters. They relied on two desperate and on-hand labor pools: tenants themselves and jobless men. New landlords would speak of ‘knowing a good plumber.’ Experienced landlords would say they ‘had a guy.’ Lamar knew that Sherrena ‘had people’ and doubted that she would let him stay. He did the painting anyway, having no better option.”
• “Like many inner-city landlords, Sherrena and Quentin tried to limit the number of appliances in their units. If you didn’t include a stove or refrigerator, you didn’t have to fix it when it broke.”
• “Reported high rates of joblessness among black men with little education obscured the fact that many of these men did regularly work, if not in the formal labor market. Some hustling in the underground economy plied the illicit trades, but the biggest drug kingpin in the city would have been envious of the massive cash-paid labor force urban landlords had at their disposal.”
• “As housing projects were demolished, the voucher program grew into the nation’s largest housing subsidy program for low-income families. In policy circles, vouchers were known as ‘public-private partnership.’ In real estate circles, they were known as ‘a win.’”
• “In the 1960s and 1970s, destitute families often relied on extended kin networks to get by. Poor black families were ‘immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,’ wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did little to lift families out of poverty, but it was enough to keep them afloat. But large-scale social transformations — the crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them — had frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit ‘kin dependence’ by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.”
• “In his old life, before the fall, he might have been more sympathetic. But he had come to view sympathy as a kind of naivete, a sentiment voiced from a certain distance by the callow middle classes. ‘They can be compassionate because it’s not their only option,’ he said of liberals who didn’t live in trailer parks.”
• “No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.”
• “Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them — which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.”
• “All over the city, people who lived in distressed neighborhoods were more likely to help their neighbors pay bills, buy groceries, fix their car, or lend a hand in other ways, compared to their peers in better-off areas.”
• “When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice, full of ‘all sorts of shipwrecked humanity,’ they lost confidence in its political capacity. Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma — believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addiction, and other harrowing events — were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives. This lack of faith had less to do with their neighborhood’s actual poverty and crime rates than with the level of concentrated suffering they perceived around them. A community that saw so clearly its own pain had a difficult time also sensing its potential.”
• “Scott had never reached out to his family for help. He considered their lawns and jobs and children and normal problems and concluded, ‘They wouldn’t know what to do… How much help could they possibly be?’ Middle-class relatives could be useless that way.”
• “The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. After the numbers were released, Milwaukee’s chief of police appeared on the local news and puzzled over the fact that many victims had never contacted the police for help. A nightly news reporter summed up the chief’s views: ‘He believes that if police were contacted more often, that victims would have the tools to prevent fatal situations from occurring in the future.’ What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department’s own rules presented battered women with a devil’s bargain: keep quiet and face abuse, or call the police and face eviction.”
• “To Sammy, Pastor Daryl, and others, Larraine was poor because she threw money away. But the reverse was more true. Larraine threw money away because she was poor.”
• “People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They might buy lobster on food stamps.”
• “‘I have a right to live, and I have a right to live like I want to live,’ she said. ‘People don’t realize that even poor people get tired of the same old taste. Like, I literally hate hot dogs, but I was brought up on them. So you think, ‘When I get older, I will have steak.’ So now I’m older. And I do.’”
• “Job loss could lead to eviction, but the reverse was also true. An eviction not only consumed renters’ time, causing them to miss work, it also weighed heavily on their minds, often triggering mistakes on the job. It overwhelmed workers with stress, leading them to act unprofessionally, and commonly resulted in their relocating farther away from their worksite, increasing the likelihood of being late or missing days.”
• “Four days after the baby came, Belt Buckle called and told Pam and Ned that their application had been approved. Pam had two evictions on her record, was a convicted felon, and received welfare. Ned had an outstanding warrant, no verifiable income, and a long record that included three evictions, felony drug convictions, and several misdemeanors like reckless driving and carrying a concealed weapon. They had five daughters. But they were white.”
• “When Arleen was alone, she sometimes cried for [her cat.] But she was teaching her sons to love small, to reject what they could not have. Arleen was protecting them, and herself. What other self-defense was there for a single mother who could not consistently provide for her children? If a poor father failed his family, he could leave the way Larry did, try again at some time down the road. Poor mothers — most of them, anyway — had to embrace this failure, and live with it.”
• “Most Milwaukeeans believed their city was racially segregated because people preferred it that way. But the ghetto had always been more a product of social design than desire. It was never a by-product of the modern city, a sad accident of industrialization and urbanization, something no one benefitted from nor intended. The ghetto had always been a main feature of landed capital, a prime moneymaker for those who saw ripe opportunity in land scarcity, housing dilapidation, and racial segregation.”
• “Other landlords and property management companies… tried to avoid discriminating by setting clear criteria and holding all applicants to the same standards. But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or conviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans.”
• “Everyone had stopped cleaning up, and trash spread over the kitchen floor. Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health: not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.”
• “It was once said that the poor are ‘constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.’ Especially for poor African American families — who live in neighborhoods with rates of violence and concentrated poverty so extreme that even the worst white neighborhoods bear little resemblance — living in degrading housing in dangerous neighborhoods sent a clear message about where the wider society thought they belonged.”
• “After trying for seventy-three places, Vanetta and Crystal were approved for a $500-a-month two-bedroom apartment. Desperate tenants willing to overlook neglected repairs had found a desperate landlord willing to overlook evictions and convictions.”
• “What the judge was saying, in essence, was: We all agree that you were poor and scared when you did this violent, hurtful thing (she had stolen a purse at gunpoint), and if you had been allowed to go on working five days a week at Old Country Buffet, refilling soup pots and mopping up frozen yogurt spills, none of us would be here right now. You might have been able to save enough to move to an apartment that was de-leaded and clean in a neighborhood without drug dealers and with safe schools. With time, you may have been able to get Bo-Bo the medical treatment he needs for his seizures, and maybe you could have even started taking night classes to become a nurse, like you always wanted. And, who knows, maybe you could have actually become a nurse, a real nurse with a uniform and everything. Then you could really give your kids a childhood that would look nothing like the one Shortcake gave you. If you did that, you would walk around this cold city with your head held high, and maybe you would eventually come to feel that you were worth something and deserving of a man who could support you other than by lending you his pistol for a stickup or at least one who didn’t break down your door and beat you in front of your children. Maybe you would meet someone with a steady job and get married in a small church with Kendal standing proudly up front by the groom and Tembi as the poofy-dressed flower girl and Bo-Bo as the grinning, toddling ring bearer, just like you always dreamed it, and from that day on your groom would introduce you as ‘my wife.’ But that’s not what happened. What happened was that your hours were cut, and your electricity was about to be shut off, and you and your children were about to be thrown out of your home, and you snatched someone’s purse as your friend pointed a gun at her face. And if it was poverty that caused this crime, who’s to say you won’t do it again? Because you were poor then and you are poor now. We all see the underlying cause, we see it every day in this court. But the justice system is no charity, no jobs program, no Housing Authority. If we cannot pull the weed up from the roots, then at least we can cut it low at the stem.”
• “David and Anna’s working-class home was one of those places that seemed to belong to everybody. People would walk through the door without knocking and open the refrigerator without asking. ‘This is the Aldea Recovery House,’ Anna would say. ‘If somebody’s not here, somebody’s calling.’ She kept large bowls of rice and beans on hand and never locked the door.”
• “He’d have to stay clean for five years and attend bi-weekly AA meetings. Scott recognized his weaknesses. He didn’t know if he would have tried harder to get clean years ago if the nursing board had not put license reinstatement so far out of reach. But giving up did come easier when things seemed impossible.”
• “‘It is difficult to force a man out of himself and to take an interest in the affairs of the whole state,’ Alexis de Tocqueville once observed. ‘But if it is a question of taking a road past his property, he sees at once that this small public matter has a bearing on his greatest private interests.’ It is only after we begin to see a street as our street, a public park as our park, a school as our school, that we can become engaged citizens, dedicating our time and resources for worthwhile causes: joining the Neighborhood Watch, volunteering to beautify a playground, or running a school board.”
• “What else is a nation but a patchwork of cities and towns; cities and towns a patchwork of neighborhoods; and neighborhoods a patchwork of homes?”
• “Efforts to establish local cohesion and community investment are thwarted in neighborhoods with high turnover rates. In this way, eviction can unravel the fabric of a community, helping to ensure that neighbors remain strangers and that their collective capacity to combat crime and promote civic engagement remains untapped. Milwaukee neighborhoods with high eviction rates have higher violent crime rates the following year, even after controlling for past crime rates and other relevant factors.”
• “Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.”
• “Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market. Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation.”
• “But [solutions] depend on how we answer a single question: do we believe that the right to a decent home is part of what it means to be an American?”
• “If we acknowledge that housing is a basic right of all Americans, then we must think differently about another right: the right to make as much money as possible by providing families with housing — and especially to profit excessively from the less fortunate. Since the founding of this country, a long line of American visionaries have called for a more balanced relationship, one that protects people from the profit motive, ‘not to destroy individualism,’ in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words, ‘but to protect it.’ Child labor laws, the minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, and other protections we now take for granted came about when we chose to place the well-being of people above money.”
• “In fixating almost exclusively on what poor people and their communities lack — good jobs, a strong safety net, role models — we have neglected the critical ways that exploitation contributes to the persistence of poverty. We have overlooked a fact that landlords never have: there is a lot of money to be made off the poor. The ‘hood is good.”
• “The idea is simple. Every family below a certain income level would be eligible for a housing voucher. They could use that voucher to live anywhere they wanted, just as families can use food stamps to buy groceries virtually anywhere, as long as their housing was neither too expensive, big, and luxurious, nor too shabby and run-down. Their home would need to be decent, modest, and fairly priced. Program administrators could develop fine-grained analyses, borrowing from algorithms and other tools commonly used in the private market, to prevent landlords from charging too much and families from selecting more housing than they need. The family would dedicate 30 percent of their income to housing costs, with the voucher paying the rest.”
• “Building that much public housing risks repeating the failures of the past, by drawing the nation’s poorest citizens under the same roof and contributing to racial segregation and concentrated poverty.”
• “Families crushed by the high cost of housing cannot afford vocational training or extra schooling that would allow them to acquire new skills and many cannot stay in one place long enough to hold down the same job. Affordable housing is a human-capital investment, just like job programs or education, one that would strengthen and steady the American workforce. By and large, the poor do not want some small life. They don’t want to game the system or eke out an existence; they want to thrive and contribute: to become nurses (that was Vanetta’s dream) or run their own charities (that was Arleen’s). A stable home would extend to them the opportunity to realize those dreams.”
• “But even if code enforcement and program administration were made much more reasonable and landlord-friendly, some property owners — particularly those operating in prosperous areas — would still turn away voucher holders. They simply don’t want ‘those people.’ If we continue to permit this kind of discrimination, we consign voucher holders to certain landlords who own property in certain neighborhoods. Doing so denies low-income families the opportunity to move into economically healthy and safe neighborhoods and hobbles our ability to promote integration through social policy. Accordingly, a universal voucher program would not only strive to make participation attractive to landlords, it would also mandate participation. Just as we have outlawed discrimination on the basis of race or religion, discrimination against voucher holders would be illegal under a universal voucher program.”
• “‘The business of housing the poor,’ Jacob Riis wrote 125 years ago, ‘if it is to amount to anything, must be a business, as it was business with our fathers to put them where they are. As charity, pastime, or fad, it will miserably fail, always and everywhere.’”
• “Making a universal housing program as efficient as possible would require regulating costs. Expanding housing vouchers without stabilizing rent would be asking taxpayers to subsidize landlords’ profits. Today, landlords overcharge voucher holders simply because they can. In distressed neighborhoods, where voucher holders tend to live, market rent is lower than what landlords are allowed to charge voucher holders, according to metropolitan-wide rent ceilings set by program administrators. So the Housing Choice Voucher Program likely costs not millions but billions of dollars more than it should, resulting in the unnecessary denial of help to hundreds of thousands of families. In fact, economists have argued that the current housing voucher program could be expanded to serve all poor families in America without additional spending if we prevented overcharging and made the program more efficient.”
• “If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.”
• “When I began studying poverty as a graduate student, I learned that most accounts explained inequality in one of two ways. The first referenced ‘structural forces’ seemingly beyond our control: historical legacies of discrimination, say, or massive transformations of the economy. The second emphasized individual deficiencies, from ‘cultural’ practices, like starting a family out of wedlock, to ‘human capital’ shortfalls, like low levels of education. Liberals preferred the first explanation and conservatives the second. To me, both seemed off. Each treated low-income families as if they lived in quarantine.”
• “Why, I wondered, have we documented how the poor make ends meet without asking why their bills are so high or where their money is flowing?”
• “Together, these combined data sources provide a new portrait of the powerful ways the private housing sector is shaping the lives of poor American families and their communities. They have shown that problems endemic to poverty — residential instability, severe deprivation, concentrated neighborhood disadvantage, health disparities, even joblessness — stem from the lack of affordable housing in our cities. I have made all survey data publicly available through the Harvard Dataverse Network.”
• “It is ultimately up to future researchers to determine whether what I found in Milwaukee is true in other places. A thousand questions remain unanswered. We need a robust sociology of housing that reaches beyond a narrow focus on policy and public housing. We need a new sociology of displacement that documents the prevalence, causes, and consequences of eviction. And perhaps most important, we need a committed sociology of inequality that includes a serious study of exploitation and extractive markets.”
• “Maybe what we are really asking when we ask if a study is ‘generalizable’ is: Can it really be this bad everywhere? Or maybe we’re asking: Do I really have to pay attention to this problem?”
• “And after almost every academic talk I have given on the material in this book, I have been asked questions like ‘How did you feel when you saw that?’ ‘How did you gain this sort of access?’ These are fine questions but there is a bigger game afoot. There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land. At a time of rampant inequality and widespread hardship, when hunger and homelessness are found throughout America, I am interested in a different, more urgent conversation. ‘I’ don’t matter. I hope that when you talk about this book, you talk first about Sherrena and Tobin, Arleen and Jori, Larraine and Scott and Pam, Crystal and Vanetta — and the fact that somewhere in your city, a family has just been evicted from their home, their things piled high on the sidewalk.”