I’m not certain of it but I believe this may be the first book review that has ever appeared in Housing Management Update. That is, of course, if you don’t count the HUD Handbook 4350.3 as a “book” in the conventional sense!
Let me start at the end. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond is a must read for anyone involved in property management, particularly those who are in the affordable housing world. I’ll take it one giant step further: it’s a must-read for every American who cares about our future as a nation.
Desmond is a professor of social sciences at Harvard University and a 2015 recipient of a prestigious “Genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He has written extensively on issues of race and poverty. In addition to MacArthur, his work has been supported by such foundations as Ford, Russell Sage, and the National Science Foundation. Based on that brief background, I’m guessing at least half of you are about to stop reading this article, thinking, “just another academic book written by a guy in an ivory tower.” I’d be in that half if I hadn’t already read the book. And, if it wasn’t for the fact that the book is set in a city near where I live, it’s unlikely I would have read it in the first place.
Desmond spent over a year deeply embedded in the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His book chronicles the lives of eight families as they face eviction. The stories are riveting, even for a guy like me who started out working in the toughest public housing projects in Miami and has spent nearly 40 years in the housing industry.
This is a book based in Milwaukee but it is not about Milwaukee. As Desmond points out, it is a story that could have been written about many cities in America. Desmond provides us with a glimpse inside what, thankfully, many of us have not experienced first-hand – being evicted, with few resources, little hope for the future, and a litany of both self-inflicted and externally-imposed wounds.
In a way “Evicted” is two books in one. The main part of the book (24 chapters covering 282 pages) stays away from conclusions, blame, and prescriptions. It simply tells the stories – true stories of families beset by most of the problems we have come to associate with poverty. It is in the twenty-page Epilogue where Desmond shifts gears dramatically, going from researcher to advocate. In some ways I wish he would have skipped his epilogue altogether. It was like sitting through a thrilling 2-hour movie that is immediately followed by the director taking ten more minutes to tell you the moral of the story. On the other hand, Desmond’s conclusions and positions – some of which I agree with and many of which I do not – certainly stimulate you to think about the bigger picture.
It is instructive to note that, except in one indirect circumstance, none of the families portrayed in the book were facing eviction from the traditional government-sponsored housing programs familiar to many of our readers. In my opinion, this is a significant flaw in the book. It is true that some of the people he followed had been evicted from such housing in the past, but Desmond provides little insight into the circumstances surrounding those evictions. The book does touch on the difficulties some of the families encounter accessing federal housing programs, particularly public housing, and while not saying it until his epilogue, it is clear Desmond sees this as a major problem. In most cases, the families are being thrown out of private “affordable” housing – from run down duplexes in the nearly all-black inner city to wretched trailer parks filled with poor whites. No age group is left out – infants, children, young adults, the middle-aged, and seniors – all are represented in the stories.
The stories are sad, aggravating, depressing, and, only occasionally, uplifting. They are also illuminating.
In his epilogue, entitled Home and Hope, Desmond lays out his vision for the fix; a fix he sees as, if not simple, at least straightforward. To paraphrase, Desmond believes that “this would all go away if we just made decent housing a right.” It sounds good but it simply doesn’t square with the facts and it doesn’t square with the decades of experience we have had in housing the poor. I found this comment most telling: “When people have a place to live, they become better parents, workers, and citizens.” Alas, if that were only true. I venture to guess that most of us, particularly those who have worked in and around subsidized housing, would support a slight adjustment to Desmond’s statement: “When people have a place to live, they have a better chance to become better parents, workers, and citizens.” It’s a small change, but a profound one.
In the end Desmond advocates for the widespread use of housing vouchers and, if not the end of evictions as we know them, at least the erection of barriers that would make an eviction next to impossible. Expanding affordable housing is a laudable goal in my view. Eliminating eviction is not. That is not to say that many of the practices chronicled in Desmond’s book should be tolerated by a compassionate and fair society. It is not to say that “the system” is working just fine and is not in need of reform. But eliminating standards and consequences is not the answer. It is a recipe for disaster; not just on a systemic basis, but on the very personal levels experienced by families caught up in poverty.
Desmond’s prescriptions don’t end with eliminating evictions. He advocates other measures, including barring housing authorities from considering past evictions and unpaid debts in the tenant section process. We have tried that. It didn’t work. In fact, policies such as the ones he advocates have proved to be significant contributors to the decline of properties, and, far too often, the failure of entire housing organizations.
There are many other aspects of Desmond’s epilogue that I found troubling but in the end, the main body of his work is so compelling that it makes “Evicted” one that should be required reading for anyone involved in affordable housing, the provision of services to the poor, and the creation and implementation of our landlord/tenant laws.