Evicted
by Matthew Desmond
Summary
Matthew Desmond spent more than a year living in a trailer park and a rooming house on Milwaukee's poorest blocks to write Evicted, and the book follows eight families and two landlords through the everyday mechanics of losing a home. Arleen Belle, a Black single mother, moves her sons from one substandard apartment to the next as evictions pile up on her record and make each next lease harder to get. Lamar, who lost both legs, raises two boys in the same trailer park while managing debt collectors and a body that limits what work he can do. Scott, a white nurse whose addiction to opioids cost him his professional license, slides from a stable life into the same precarious housing market as everyone else in the book. Desmond also follows two landlords, Sherrena and Tobin, closely enough to show how eviction functions as a business model rather than an occasional last resort, with rents in the poorest neighborhoods costing landlords proportionally less to profit from than housing in wealthier ones.
Desmond's central claim, built from both this fieldwork and quantitative analysis of eviction court records, is that eviction is not simply a symptom of poverty but a cause of it, a disruption that costs people jobs, school stability for their children, and any chance to build the kind of history landlords look for in a tenant. He closes by proposing a universal housing voucher program that would cap what any family pays for housing at thirty percent of income.
Reading Evicted means moving between intimate, scene by scene reporting and clearly presented data, and it suits a reader who wants the human specifics of American poverty alongside a policy argument grounded in years of fieldwork rather than abstraction.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Matthew Desmond the 2017 Prize for General Nonfiction for Evicted, published in March 2016 by Crown. It also won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2016, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and it was later named to The New York Times list of the hundred best books of the twenty first century so far. The finalists for the Pulitzer that year were John Donvan and Caren Zucker's In a Different Key, on the history of autism, and Micki McElya's The Politics of Mourning.
Bill Gates called the book a brilliant portrait of Americans living in poverty, while some reviewers closer to Milwaukee, including a critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, questioned whether eviction itself was really the cause Desmond claimed rather than a symptom of deeper dysfunction. Desmond has continued research and advocacy on housing policy since the book's publication, founding a research institute focused on the subject.