Eviction

The central reframe of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is that eviction is a cause of poverty, not just a symptom of it. 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 children’s 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.

Per the book, eviction is also 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, one woman renter in seventeen was evicted each year, and even landlords applying “the same standards to everyone” reproduced inequality, because neutral eviction and criminal screens fell hardest on African Americans. Desmond’s proposed fix is a universal housing voucher capped at 30% of income, paired with rent regulation to stop overcharging.

Where this appears

• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City — the book’s titular subject; framed as a cause (not merely a symptom) of poverty, and as a gendered/racialized process paralleling incarceration.