Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Book Reviews that loosely weaves together ideas of relational subjectivity with the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann—I gave up. The world is in flames. We need good, clear, accurate, and powerful ex- planations for what’s happening so that we can figure out how to smartly move forward. Maybe a sociologist will read some critical realism and get inspired to produce a brilliant explanation she or he wouldn’t have other- wise. I hope so. But neither of these two books makes a convincing case that critical realism is the royal road to sociological truth. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. By Matthew Desmond. New York: Crown Publishers, 2016. Pp. xi1420. $28.00. David J. Harding University of California, Berkeley Matthew Desmond’s Evicted is first and foremost an ethnography about the daily experiences of poverty with a unique focus on the causes and con- sequences of housing instability and housing quality. Unlike prior poverty ethnographies that focus on a particular neighborhood, this book shadows eight poor families, both black and white, and two landlords who rent apartments, houses, or trailer homes to the poor. Following the experiences of these research subjects over multiple years in Milwaukee reveals in painstaking detail the central importance of eviction to the contemporary experience of being poor. These arguments are buttressed by other data sources as well, including surveys of renters and administrative records from housing court. In short, one cannot read Evicted without coming to the conclusion that eviction and its consequences play a central role in trap- ping individuals and families in poverty. Despite the focus on public housing and housing vouchers in public and academic discussions of housing and poverty, Evicted points out that most of the poor are on their own in the private rental market, one in which there is surprisingly little variation in rents across neighborhoods and almost no options that are anywhere near affordable for a family trying to get by on low-wage work or public assistance. Landlords who rent to such families can rarely count on consistently receiving the full payment of rent, and, as a result, the apartments, houses, and trailers available to such families are typically in chronic disrepair, including broken plumbing, inoperable appliances and furnaces, and broken doors and windows. The state is ab- sent from the market in many ways, with minimal proactive enforcement of building code violations, few resources devoted to affordable housing, and little regulation of rents. Yet when the state does play a role, it is over- whelmingly arrayed against the tenant. Nuisance complaints recorded by the police motivate evictions, sheriff’s deputies execute evictions, child wel- fare agencies take children away when families become homeless or live in unsafe housing, and the complexities of housing courts favor the landlord This content downloaded from 169.229.151.152 on June 30, 2017 10:30:27 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).