Jacob Riis

In Evicted, Matthew Desmond quotes Jacob Riis on the economics of housing the poor: “‘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.’” Desmond enlists Riis alongside Jane Jacobs, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the book’s intellectual frame for thinking about poverty, profit, and the housing of the poor — the line foreshadows Desmond’s own argument about how the rental market profits from the poor.

Context: Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was a Danish-American journalist and social-documentary photographer whose 1890 book How the Other Half Lives exposed slum conditions in New York City and helped drive housing and tenement reform during the Progressive Era.

Where this appears

• Evicted — quoted on housing the poor as necessarily a business (not charity) if it is to succeed, anchoring Desmond’s argument about profit and poverty