🏘️📚🌧 Housing is a basic human need. It irrevocably shapes our lives and our destinies. It also can be a lucrative and, at times, cruel and devastating business. This landmark nonfiction work tells eight stories of families who were swept up in the process of eviction. Along the way, the book sheds new light on the myriad social currents, large and small, that have brought American society to the brink of an alarming housing crisis. The people whose stories are told within— tenants and landlords alike— are expertly brought to life though the author’s masterfully descriptive and empathetic writing. I was completely engrossed in this astonishing book. The stories it tells seem so familiar yet they reveal something new about who we are as a society; about power, privilege, and the meaning of home. 📖

This heartbreaking and hard to put down book is an eye-opening look into the affordable housing crisis affecting so many lives today. I particularly enjoyed the author’s ability to tell the stories of his subjects without making himself a character. He acknowledges that there is no simple solution to the lack of affordable housing, but does offer an afterward with some solutions, including expanding the voucher system. Highly recommended.

I found this book both enlightening and frustrating. Blending respectable authorial skills with awesome first-hand observation data, Desmond exposes the raw and painful lives of Milwaukee residents who can barely afford their rent. These people need help but don’t get it from family, friends, or social services. Every failure sets them up for the next one. The detailed analysis moved me like a well-developed novel does. So, I was more than a little frustrated by the conclusion he draws from it: that a universal voucher system is the cure-all. That money would be better spent reforming the system, making it possible for social workers to coach renters on their lifestyle/habits and getting better rules for the landlords to adopt on pain of prosecution.

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The hardest part about reading Evicted was coming to the realization that, more often than not, both sides, tenants and landlords, are only doing what is best for themselves financially, socially, or emotionally. In each of the followed characters’ story arcs, there is solid logic behind most of their actions, even if the action (i.e. an eviction of a family with children) seems so heartless with all the visibility and drama that accompanies it, or seems unwise (i.e. buying up lobster with the whole month’s allotment of food stamps). I think Desmond’s focus on the logic behind every person’s decisions prompts the reader to question the overarching systems keeping things difficult and unequal for people seeking safe, affordable housing. I like how he frames a safe place to live as a right rather than a privilege or something to be earned. The overarching problems hurting families and communities include racism, lack of built housing in many locations, generational cycles of poverty, and our government’s decision not to offer universal housing vouchers to all who would qualify for them. Evicted makes it clear that these sorts of issues are the ones we need to tackle in America, before blaming individual landlords for just thinking about their bottom line, or blaming tenants for an apparent lack of personal responsibility. I appreciate how Desmond offers tangible solutions in his epilogue, instead of leaving off in a totally depressing way; I always like when books are able to do that.

Honest and raw, Desmond holds nothing back looking at both sides of a the housing crisis. I greatly enjoyed this read. It compliments nicely with Just Mercy.

The reporting is almost as amazing as the findings. Eye-opening if this is not your life.

Evicted by Matthew Desmond is the 2019 Read Brave nonfiction selection. A 2017 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, it follows eight Milwaukee families struggling to pay their rent around the 2008 financial crisis.

Powerful and compelling book. Sympathetic, but clear-eyed where it would be easy to devolve into sentimentality. The author shows how a series of poor decisions can leave people behind the proverbial eight ball, particularly in the area of stable housing. The negative effects cascade, but there is hope and opportunity. Well worth the time to read this book!

This reads like a novel, but be warned. It is not the product of the author’s imagination. Made of victim’s stories in Milwaukee (“I feel dirty,” lamented the author, “collecting these stories and hardships like so many trophies.”) it could be about any city in the US. It shows the brokenness of a system that rewards for “cycling through” tenants – and it should kill those political ideas that the poor are lazy and deserve their situation. Many of the people in this book are trying to find work, or are already working two or more full-time jobs. Read this and your assumptions will be challenged, and you will want to help out.