Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Matthew Desmond’s Evicted plunges readers into the heart of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods, using immersive, ethnographic fieldwork to document America’s housing crisis at its most visceral level. The book follows eight families—both Black and white—living on the absolute economic edge, where a single missed rent payment can trigger a cascade of catastrophes. Desmond embeds himself with tenants and landlords alike, constructing a narrative that reads with the urgency of a novel while maintaining rigorous sociological precision.

Through the lives of individuals like Arleen, a single mother evicted just before Christmas, and Scott, a former nurse battling addiction, the book meticulously charts how over 70% of a family’s income can be consumed by substandard housing. This financial hemorrhage leaves nothing for savings, healthcare, or emergencies, locking them in a state of perpetual crisis. Simultaneously, Desmond profiles landlords like Sherrena Tarver, revealing the economic calculations and often grim realities of providing housing in these markets, where profit margins are extracted from profound vulnerability.

The narrative systematically dismantles the myth that eviction is a rare, last-resort outcome. Instead, Desmond establishes it as a commonplace, brutalizing event, especially for Black women, that functions as a primary driver of urban poverty. An eviction record becomes a scarlet letter, banishing families to worse housing in more dangerous neighborhoods, destabilizing children’s education, and foreclosing future opportunities, thus perpetuating the cycle.

Beyond its devastating portrait, Evicted is a work of transformative social science that reorients the entire debate on poverty. It argues that housing instability is not a side effect but a core mechanism of American inequality. The book’s monumental impact lies in its fusion of human storytelling with groundbreaking data, making an irrefutable case for housing as a fundamental human right and proposing concrete, radical policy solutions aimed at the heart of the crisis.

Readers hail the book as a devastating, essential masterpiece that fundamentally altered their understanding of poverty. The immersive, novelistic storytelling is praised for forging profound empathy, making systemic injustice feel intensely personal. Criticisms are minor, occasionally noting the dense sociological data or the emotional weight of the subject matter. The consensus is one of awe at Desmond’s scholarship and a strong belief that the book should be mandatory reading for its moral and political urgency.