Evicted - Book Review - Wall Street Journal

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Wall Street Journal – 2/24/2016


No Shelter From The Storm

Book Review by Thomas J. Main -- An Associate Professor at Baruch College’s School of Public Affairs and the author of “Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking From Koch to de Blasio.”


‘Eviction,” Matthew Desmond writes in “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” “is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.” His argument in this impressive work of scholarship is that eviction is such an exploitative process, so biased in favor of profit-seeking landlords, that it pitches otherwise capable tenants into crisis and thus into poverty. He offers two types of evidence for his claim. The first is a novelistically detailed ethnographic account of the lives of eight extremely poor Milwaukee families on the verge of eviction. The second is summaries of his quantitative analyses of Milwaukee’s low-income rental housing, which show that eviction is a much more frequent event than has been thought and has long-term consequences for the health and stability of families.

As Mr. Desmond points out, eviction has been neglected by urban sociologists, so his account fills a gap. His methodology is scrupulous: He documents all his observations and employed a fact checker to verify every detail. Unfortunately, the tone of the book often resembles that of less scholarly chroniclers of urban misery, such as Jonathan Kozol. “Evicted” is chock-full of painful detail to the point of being depressing, an effect amplified by Mr. Desmond’s sometimes overwritten prose.

We learn of Lamar, a former crack addict who broke into an abandoned house one freezing night while high and fell asleep. His frostbitten legs had to be amputated, and now he struggles unsuccessfully to pay his rent by doing poor-quality painting jobs for his landlord. Crystal, diagnosed with a half-dozen psychological disorders and found to have an IQ of about 70, repeatedly stomps on one roommate’s face during an altercation and pushes another through a window. Scott was a successful nurse until he got addicted to painkillers, lost his license, started using heroin and plunged into poverty. When Vanetta’s work hours are reduced, she makes the terrible decision to participate in a botched robbery, for which she is sent to prison, leaving her children homeless. One hopes that this wrenching account will galvanize rather than desensitize readers.

What are we to make of the subjects’ many maladaptive behaviors, so frankly documented by Mr. Desmond? Does the deep poverty cause the dysfunction, or does the dysfunction cause the poverty? And do the landlords exploit the tenants, or are the tenants quite a handful for the landlords? Certainly one of the book’s most striking vignettes, in which poor, unrepresented tenants are marched through a housing court and perfunctorily evicted, documents real unfairness. On the other hand, the portrayal of the landlord Sherrena shows her to be a canny, profit-seeking entrepreneur but doesn’t document any clear illegality. (In one horrific scene, a fire in one of Sherrena’s buildings leaves a child dead. Mr. Desmond notes that “nobody had heard a smoke detector go off” but does not say there was a code violation. A fire inspector finds no liability.) Of course, the harsh reality of extreme urban poverty is indeed depressing. But eight case histories, out of Milwaukee’s approximately 105,000 renter households, despite distressing instances of injustice, do not in themselves prove his case.

The findings of Mr. Desmond’s quantitative studies, summarized mostly in the endnotes, provide more telling evidence. Here the author’s immersion in the milieu of extreme urban poverty pays off. He discovered that in many cases of forced ejection (having to leave after missing a rent payment, for example), the families involved simply refused to describe themselves as evicted and were thus not captured by narrow eviction statistics. The quantitative surveys described here probe much deeper than earlier efforts and show that “forced moves”—understood as formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation—are in fact quite common. Mr. Desmond and a collaborator found that, from 2009 to 2011, 13% of Milwaukee renters had been evicted in this broad sense. Further, renters thus evicted moved to neighborhoods that were on average 5.4 percentage points poorer and 1.8 percentage points more crime-ridden than the neighborhoods in which renters who moved more voluntarily ended up. These findings lend considerable support to the claim that eviction causes poverty.

Mr. Desmond’s policy recommendations are mostly convincing. Guaranteed legal representation for renters in housing court and a dramatic expansion of housing vouchers for the poor sound like good ideas. Less compelling is his conclusion that landlord exploitation—“to profit excessively from the less fortunate”—is a key reason for terrible housing conditions. Mr. Desmond cites Martin Luther King saying that “every condition exists simply because someone profits by its existence.” But aren’t some people unemployed and others homeless precisely because there is no profit in hiring or housing them?

Mr. Desmond demonstrates that the owner of a seedy trailer park earns roughly $447,000 a year. But if the profit were significantly less, would those shabby accommodations remain available? When Sherrena the landlord says, “the ’hood is good”—meaning that there is money to be made in servicing the poor—we are apparently supposed to be shocked. But suppose the “hood” were less profitable? Would Sherrena still provide apartments there? Mr. Desmond himself acknowledges that “if we are going to house most low-income families in theÚ private rental market, then that market must remain profitable.”

The reader comes away from “Eviction” persuaded that extreme urban poverty makes for intolerable conditions. But the questions of how far the profit motive can be moderated without perverse consequences and how much personal responsibility can realistically be expected of the poor are far from settled.