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. 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. And as rents climb in many American cities, evictions are becoming more and more commonplace.

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. 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. 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….

[Read full story, including an interview with author Matthew Desmond.]

 

Gillian B. White, The Atlantic