One-line takeaway
Under conditions of scarcity people prioritize the now and lose sight of the future.
What is Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City about?
This Pulitzer Prize-winning book follows the struggles of eight families in Milwaukee as they try to keep a roof over their heads. The events unfold over about twenty months, between May 2008 and December 2009.
The book made me realise how difficult it is to get out of poverty, especially when people are stuck paying rent they can barely afford. Their plans for the future are clouded by this immediate need.
This struggle doesn’t stop at renters. It spirals upwards to the landlords as they, too, struggle to pay their mortgages. And if they don’t pay, even tenants who paid their rent with their hard-earned money would still lose their homes.
The book makes the case for a fundamental change in this unforgiving system.
Ideas and takeaways
Housing costs keep people poor
The gap between monthly income and rent is just too small to cover everything else. This imbalance keeps people poor.
For example, one of the tenants Desmond follows in this book, Lamar, received $628 a month. His rent was $550. That left $78 for the rest of the month. Even before considering his decisions, there was very little money left to make decisions with.
And the way the system is set up doesn’t make it easy to get out of this, either.
At the time this book was written, three in four American families who qualified for housing assistance received nothing. They still had to find somewhere to live in the private market. Eligibility offered little comfort when the help itself wasn’t available.
Planning for the future gets much more difficult when the present is in disarray
The problem-solving side of me kicked in after reading about Lamar’s situation and the grim statistics that followed, but finding a way out seemed near impossible.
Long-term thinking needs a fair amount of day-to-day stability, which a person in a situation like this can’t afford.
There are so many steps that need to be taken to get out of this precarious situation.
And many of them are out of their control.
If Arleen wanted public housing, she would have to save a month’s worth of income to repay the Housing Authority for leaving her subsidized apartment without giving notice; then wait two to three years until the List unfroze; then wait another two to five years until her application made it to the top of the pile; then pray to Jesus that the person with the stale coffee and heavy stamp reviewing her file would somehow overlook the eviction record she’d collected while trying to make ends meet in the private housing market on a welfare check.
The financial burden of renting affects both physical and mental health
And then comes another set of issues, one of which is quite a blow: the strain slowly starts to eat away at your mental health and confidence.
For example, tenants in the book who were behind on rent risked eviction if they reported problems to a building inspector.
So the fear of losing their homes keeps them from speaking up about their basic housing needs.
Their quality of life slowly slips away.
Paying rent doesn’t guarantee that you get to stay
Even if you sacrifice your physical and mental well-being just to keep a roof over your head, it doesn’t automatically guarantee that you get to stay.
In one situation described in the book, tenants were forced out of their apartment even though they had paid their rent because their landlord hadn’t paid the mortgage.
When the system is set up like this, the chain of vulnerability runs through the entire housing market.
One link breaks, and everyone further down the chain is left to deal with the consequences.
The sheriff deputies stepped away to confer. “These people got screwed,” John told his partner. “The landlord took their rent but didn’t pay the mortgage.”
A system change is in order
This is the final verdict I came to after reading this book, and I believe it’s the book’s intended message: we need a system change.
The current system keeps the poor trapped in poverty and would even push them even deeper into it.
