The 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction was awarded to the Matthew Desmond book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. The book follows eight families struggling to pay rent in poor areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. The book gets into issues of extreme poverty, affordable housing and economic exploitation in the United States.
(Matthew Desmond won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 2017 for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Desmond is a Professor of Sociology at Princeton University).
The notion underpinning the personal stories of families aiming to keep a home over their heads, in part, was to show many what life is really like when home uncertainty, living, and the fundamentals of living may be beyond your grasp. The stories shared are filled with the emotion of survival in circumstances with many causes and what feels like insufficient solutions. In putting faces and true life stories to this subject, and doing the telling of these stories largely without suggested solutions until the epilogue where proposals were made, was truly an accomplishment of this work.
(Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City was written by Matthew Desmond).
For that accomplishment, my point is that you should read Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. The stories hit you with the powerful emotion and convincing logic of human suffering that the human toll of home uncertainty at a moment’s notice, with housing costs far in excess of 30% of income for those familiar with the budgetary considerations of even modest middle class life.
(Matthew Desmond spent more than a year in the company of eight families affected by extreme poverty in Milwaukee as research for the book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City).
When getting to the point of solutions, Desmond points to the politics of both sides of the two major schools of political thought driving discourse on this subject currently. The following are offerings taken almost exactly from the text.
Liberals point “to structural forces – historical legacies of discrimination, say, or massive transformations of the economy.”
Conservatives point “to individual deficiencies, such as cultural practices outside of wedlock or human capital shortfalls like low levels of education.”
Both seemed to miss a point that Desmond then argues, which is that these thoughts “treat the poor like they live in quarantine. Books about single mothers, gang members or the homeless treat poor people like they are out of the inequality debate.”
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City as a book documents that while looking at a logical intersection for where those without money (the evicted) and those with real estate intersect. Other than through employment or government, there doesn’t seem a more logical place that these intersect than through housing. In provoking conversation that gets housing at some level outside of the exploitation phase of demand existing beyond supply, Matthew Desmond certainly initiates a conversation that is nothing if not humane. I rate the book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City at 4.25-stars on a scale of one-to-five.
Matt – Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Matt Lynn Digital 