Matthew Desmond

One-line: Sociologist of poverty and housing whose ethnography Evicted reframed eviction as a cause of poverty, not just a symptom of it.

What we know

• Author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a year-in-the-field study of eight families and their landlords in Milwaukee (source: Evicted).
• Argues that poverty research has fixated on what the poor lack while ignoring how much money is extracted from them — “there is a lot of money to be made off the poor. The ‘hood is good” (source: Evicted).
• Rejects the standard liberal “structural forces” vs. conservative “individual deficiency” framing of inequality; says both “treated low-income families as if they lived in quarantine” (source: Evicted).
• Proposes a universal housing voucher with mandatory landlord participation and rent regulation, arguing it could be funded without new spending if overcharging were curbed (source: Evicted).
• Released his Milwaukee survey data publicly through the Harvard Dataverse Network (source: Evicted).

Mentioned in

• Evicted — author.

Connections

• Poverty — Desmond’s central subject; he reframes it around extraction from the poor rather than what they lack.
• Real Estate — his ethnography studies landlords, eviction, and the rental market as engines of poverty, and proposes housing vouchers with rent regulation.

Open questions

• Other works (e.g. Poverty, by America) and the Eviction Lab — not yet in the corpus.