Rent, Out, and After – Examining the Process of Eviction in Urban America

The global financial crisis in 2008 brought to the fore of public attention the personal tragedies involved in thousands of families' loss of affordable housing across the United States. Almost a decade later, the private agonies involved in losing the family home have mostly faded from public view. In his ethnography Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city, sociologist Matthew Desmond refocuses readers' attention on the centrality of affordable housing to the functioning of democratic society. He does this through looking at a process that has been little researched - eviction. Rather than examining poverty through looking at "poor people or poor places," Desmond chose to examine eviction as a process that binds "poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle" (p. 317). In his book, Desmond argues that eviction is a cause, rather than consequence of poverty.Desmond began his study in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2008 when he moved into a trailer park from which residents were facing mass eviction. There he met the residents and owner of the trailer park, Tobin Charney, and learned about the challenges that many residents face "making rent." Readers learn about Scott, a former nurse struggling with addiction, as well as other residents: Larraine, and Pam and Ned and their daughters. Later in the year, via a security guard whom he had met at the trailer park, Desmond moved into a boarding house on the north side of the city, where he met landlords, Sherrena and Quentin, owners of 36 innercity units. Through shadowing Sherrena and Quentin as they went about the daily tasks involved in managing their properties, Desmond met Arleen and her sons, Lamar and his sons, and the three-generation Hinkston family. Via these families, Desmond also meets other characters whose stories are featured later in the book.The book is organized in three eight-chapter parts: "Rent": provides the backgrounds and contexts for the odysseys of each of the book's protagonists; "Out": describes the eviction process as it occurs for the study's participants; and "After": details what happens to the individuals and families once they have been evicted. The book concludes with an epilogue in which Desmond outlines his vision for policies that might be enacted to stem the enormous damage inflicted on the poor, for whom affordable housing is not available. The book concludes with a detailed methodological overview of how this qualitative study was conducted and an explanation for how the author chose to represent the findings of the study.Desmond used ethnographic methods to conduct his study: findings are based primarily on being there. These are supplemented by findings from detailed analysis of documents and countless interviews with others relevant to the study. Not only did Desmond live in close vicinity to his participants as a full-time ethnographer, he digitally recorded numerous conversations that were later transcribed. Desmond's methodological afterword details the painstaking and systematic process he used to confirm the details of what participants told him. Not typical for reports from social science research, Desmond employed a fact-checker prior to publishing the book. Desmond also provides an overview of the documents he analyzed and the survey studies he has conducted that lend understanding to how representative the participants' experiences are. Informed by the findings of this qualitative study, these quantitative studies were specifically designed to capture data not easily gained via surveys. Findings from these additional studies and academic sources are meticulously cataloged in over 60 pages of comprehensive endnotes.The stories of Arleen, Scott, Larraine, Pam and Ned, Lamar, the Hinkston family, and later additions, Crystal and Vanetta, are vividly portrayed through narrative descriptions and dialogue. The stories of these individuals and their families make for compelling reading - variously leaving the reader frustrated, angry, and inevitably heart-broken to learn of the devastating consequences of eviction for these people. …