Jump to content

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City


Geee

Recommended Posts

 

When deputies and movers show up to execute an eviction in Milwaukee, the renter is given three options: His possessions—televisions, books, clothes, mattresses, children’s toys—can either be loaded on a truck for moving, taken to a bonded storage facility that charges hundreds of dollars, or dumped on the curb for garbage collection. Whatever the choice, individuals, families, and neighborhoods are traumatized.

 

 

  • EVICTED, BY MATTHEW DESMOND

    Now on Amazon VIEW BOOK

Matthew Desmond captures that trauma convincingly in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. The book offers a Dickensian portrait of poverty, exploitation, and the kaleidoscopic dysfunction that surrounds eviction in urban America. In 2008 and 2009, Desmond, a Harvard professor and MacArthur “genius,” followed eight low-income Milwaukee families, both black and white. His account of their lives is as sorrowful as it is maddening. There is Lamar, for example, who gets high on crack and sleeps in an abandoned building until his extremities freeze. One day he wakes up legless in a hospital. There is Arleen, who chooses to pay for a relative’s funeral rather than pay her rent. And there are the homeless women who head off to the local casino to wager their last few dollars.

In Desmond’s telling, drugs are omnipresent and intact families are unheard of. Men are either absent or on the way out the door. The disappearance of male wage earners has had a ruinous effect on poor black women in particular. Desmond argues that the epidemic of evictions has become for black women what mass incarceration has become for black men. “No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching,” he writes, “can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.” According to Desmond, having a home is “the well spring of personhood” and the foundation for stable civic life. Noting that rent can consume as much as 70 percent of a poor person’s income, he makes a powerful case that the matter should be at the top of the nation’s antipoverty agenda.Scissors-32x32.png

 

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/let-eat-lobster/

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • 1711654797
×
×
  • Create New...