Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (Epub)

Description

In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY President Barack Obama • The New York Times Book Review • The Boston Globe • The Washington Post • NPR • Entertainment Weekly • The New Yorker • Bloomberg • Esquire • BuzzFeed • Fortune • San Francisco Chronicle • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Politico • The Week • Chicago Public Library • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly • Booklist • Shelf Awareness

WINNER OF: The National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction • The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction • The Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism • The PEN/New England Award • The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize

FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE AND THE KIRKUS PRIZE

“Evicted stands among the very best of the social justice books.”—Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and Commonwealth

“Gripping and moving—tragic, too.”—Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage the Bones

“Evicted is that rare work that has something genuinely new to say about poverty.”—San Francisco Chronicle

User’s Reviews

Review “Astonishing… Desmond has set a new standard for reporting on poverty.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times Book Review“After reading Evicted, you’ll realize you cannot have a serious conversation about poverty without talking about housing. . . . The book is that good, and it’s that unignorable.”—Jennifer Senior, New York Times“This book gave me a better sense of what it is like to be very poor in this country than anything else I have read. . . . It is beautifully written, thought-provoking, and unforgettable.”—Bill Gates“Inside my copy of his book, Mr. Desmond scribbled a note: ‘home = life.’ Too many in Washington don’t understand that. We need a government that will partner with communities, from Appalachia to the suburbs to downtown Cleveland, to make hard work pay off for all these overlooked Americans.”—Senator Sherrod Brown, Wall Street Journal“My God, what [Evicted] lays bare about American poverty. It is devastating and infuriating and a necessary read.”—Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Difficult Women“Written with the vividness of a novel, [Evicted] offers a dark mirror of middle-class America’s obsession with real estate, laying bare the workings of the low end of the market, where evictions have become just another part of an often lucrative business model.”—Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times“In spare and penetrating prose . . . Desmond has made it impossible to consider poverty without grappling with the role of housing. This pick [as best book of 2016] was not close.”—Carlos Lozada, Washington Post“An essential piece of reportage about poverty and profit in urban America.”—Geoff Dyer, The Guardian“It doesn’t happen every week (or every month, or even year), but every once in a while a book comes along that changes the national conversation. . . . Evicted looks to be one of those books.”—Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review“Should be required reading in an election year, or any other.”—Entertainment Weekly“Powerful, monstrously effective . . . The power of this book abides in the indelible impression left by its stories.”—Jill Leovy, The American Scholar“Gripping and important . . . [Desmond’s] portraits are vivid and unsettling.”—Jason DeParle, New York Review of Books“An exquisitely crafted, meticulously researched exploration of life on the margins, providing a voice to people who have been shamefully ignored—or, worse, demonized—by opinion makers over the course of decades.”—The Boston Globe“[An] impressive work of scholarship . . . As Mr. Desmond points out, eviction has been neglected by urban sociologists, so his account fills a gap. His methodology is scrupulous.”—Wall Street Journal

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ I’ve been a landlord for 40 years in a blue collar town. I started as a compassionate, trusting person willing to work with people and help them achieve stability. As a result, I’ve had people tell me their kitchen cabinets got stolen, had someone give a friend the storm door to their apartment because their friend liked it, driven someone to an apartment to view it and then had to evict her later due to non-payment, relocated a tenant to a more affordable apartment that she agreed to work on (with me paying for materials) only to have to evict her for non-payment, and overall have lost well over $60,000 in the process. If providing housing is a business, the owners NEED to make a profit. If it’s a charity, then it should be run as such. To demonize landlords for needing to make a profit from their time, expertise, investment and energy is unfair. Wal-Mart, car companies, and any other business NEEDS to make a profit to survive and grow. Nobody goes into Wal-Mart and says “I’ll pay you half and come back in a week with the balance” and expects cooperation. But a partial rent payment is supposed to be OK. (The fact that it negates the ability to evict that month seems to get lost in the shuffle. If the rent is $700, and I accept $10 as rent on the first, I CANNOT evict for non-payment of rent because the “rent” has been paid (just $690 short). There exists a segment of the population of the people that simply do not respond positively to assistance. Yes, providing such assistance FEELS good for the provider(s), but self esteem and self confidence must be earned, and come from within. The assistance tends to de-incentivize the recipient and deprive them of the opportunity to feel good about themselves and their abilities.

⭐ I have been involved with low income housing in Milwaukee for over three decades as a landlord and as an attorney for landlords and tenants. I know the neighborhoods and characters in this book all too well. If you want insight into poor people’s lives as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads, you should buy this book. The other reviews are right about how gripping those stories are. But if you are a graduate of Trump University and think you’ll get some insight into how to make obscene profits by renting to the poor you’ll find anecdotes but no real verified research about the business of landlording. Most significantly, you will not learn the truth that bringing evictions totally destroyed the rental business of Sherrena, the leading landlord protagonist.Strangely, though Desmond interviewed 30 landlords he only focuses on two. One is Tobin, a mobile home park operator on Milwaukee’s south side, which is largely white and Hispanic. Tobin indeed makes a lot of money but that is because he does not have to maintain or repair 95% of the “dwellings” in his park. Tobin rents out a concrete slab with utility connections and the tenants buy or bring their own trailers and pay their own utilities. As owners they are responsible for the exterior and interior condition of their dwelling. Only 5% of the trailers are owned by the park and rented to tenants as a living unit. So Tobin is a landlord only in the sense that you might have a landlord this summer when you drive your Winnebago to a Jellystone Park and pay rent for the parking pad and utility hookups.Then we have Sherrena who with her husband runs about 18 buildings (mostly two-family flats) in the African-American neighborhoods on the north side of Milwaukee. In a chapter titled “The ‘Hood is Good” Desmond blithely accepts Sherrena’s boast that she has a net worth of $2 million and nets $10,000 a month in rental income. Desmond is honest in portraying the many difficulties Sherrena has in collecting rent from her struggling tenants but he doesn’t do the background research (available from local court records) about the many thousands of dollars in unpaid rents and damaged units which sort of cut into profits a little bit.As to her supposed net worth of $2 million, that averages out to $111,000 for each of these 18 ghetto properties – certainly far more than some of the real dumpy ones are worth – but the author does not research the amounts of the recorded mortgages against these properties (ranging between $64,000 and $119,200) which further greatly reduce the claimed net worth. That would have been revealed in the many foreclosures filed against Sherrena’s properties which started within a year after Desmond’s visit to Milwaukee.So when this book came out in 2016 the curious reader might want to know: if the ‘hood is good for the landlord how much better has it gotten since the author did his study in 2009? Research so far shows that not one of Sherrena’s properties remains in her ownership. Starting in 2010 many were bulldozed, went into city ownership via foreclosure for nonpayment of real estate taxes or today sit as haunting, blighted eyesores. A few were foreclosed by lenders, were fixed up and are under new ownership. Evictions by Sherrena ended in the year 2010. So did her non-existent profit. She joins many small-time under-capitalized landlords who have gone bust in Milwaukee and elsewhere since the Great Recession started in 2008 with the bursting of the housing bubble.Please note that I still give the book 4 stars. Its significant defects in reporting on the “profit” aspect of its subtitle are outweighed by the important and detailed research on the effects of eviction in creating and perpetuating poverty. A better and expanded housing voucher program for low income tenants is much needed. Landlords nationwide should join Matt Desmond’s call for its implementation.

⭐ I thought the book poorly written–not surprised he wrote it from a PhD dissertation. Without a doubt poverty is a major issue in the United States but this book did little to shed light on the causes and solutions. I found it interesting that the author was so critical of Sherrena taking vacations and making money off the poor and yet by his writing a book about the poor he also made money off them. The people he used as examples of poverty were not very sympathetic. Most, if not all, of them made poor choices contributing to their housing difficulties.There were too many references to actually read or find all of them. One that I did check regarding pg 293 (kindle edition) the author says: “Every year in this country, people are evicted from their homes not by the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands but by the millions.” He cites a reference by Chester Hartman which says: “The number is likely in the many millions, but we have no way of gauging even a moderately precise figure for renters, because such data are simply not collected on a national basis or in any systematic way in most localities where evictions take place.” So much for the reference! This kind of imprecision is rampant in the book.It’s pretty easy to be cynical about this book. A young academic typically writes scholarly papers, or better yet, a text book, derived from his dissertation. None of those make money, but contribute to the author’s CV in the quest for tenure. He chose to write a popular screed that would make money instead. From the lack of rigor in this book, and the sloppy way he deals with statistics, you can see why he chose not to pursue a scholarly path with this material. One could conclude that he decided there is a market for “progressive exposes”, and he could exploit it.

⭐ First, good book and subject to write about. Well researched and written, although it jumps around to the different families in no coherent order so I did find myself trying to rehash who exactly was who in certain chapters. That said, this book wasn’t an eye opener, nor did I think it deserved all the praise and awards it received… As I read this it, it occurred to me why it got so many awards, mostly self righteous rich editors who have never been around poor people reviewed the book and found it ‘eye opening’ and ‘shocking’. I did not, and found myself more often than not calling most of the characters morons, since I’ve met these people and lived around them. The author was good at hiding some of his bias in regards to government being the solution to all…but I don’t think he hit on the main crux of the people’s problems…They make horrible choices in life. He seemed to imply in his writing that it all came down to the home and that all these people need are solid clean homes with which they can’t get evicted from and they’d go out and get GED’s, stop using crack, smoking weed, having illegitimate children, and heroin. Right.That said, he made some great points regarding the amount of rent charged versus the available supply and how landlords suck off the government when it comes to vouchers. He also exposed slumlords for what they are, pieces of trash.Overall a good read. 3/5

⭐ In “Evicted”, author Matthew Desmond seems to support the theory that stable housing produces stable people, but the examples he presents could easily be used to prove unstable people have unstable housing. I’m not sure this book is even about housing as much as it is about racism, victimhood, the economic struggles of single mothers, mental illness, the struggle of being disabled, poor judgment, and bad decisions when people put more energy into having children they can’t provide for, supporting drug habits, and maintaining violent dysfunctional relationships than they put into meaningful work and education. Just that pesky “cause versus correlation” issue, I guess… As George Bernard Shaw observed, “Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the Rich is Uselessness.” But it’s also worth remembering that it costs zero dollars to be a decent human being.The author clearly thinks it’s society’s responsibility to fix many of the hardships faced by the economically disadvantaged. I believe he may have referenced John Kenneth Galbraith in passing, but failed to mention that Galbraith (in “The Affluent Society” and “The Nature of Mass Poverty”), in trying to understand why some — in his case, third world countries — failed to improve their living conditions after being provided with the tools and techniques to do so, concluded it was partly due to the reluctance of barely subsisting populations to risk the little they had on something new, but a major further explanation was simply accommodation: people just got used to barely surviving. And that’s a shame, because, although the poor have always been with us, having poor people really doesn’t benefit a society as a whole in any way, especially when there really is plenty for everyone. It may be harsh but true that yes, even in America — actually maybe especially in America, with its aspirational culture where people are taught to hate the poor and want to acquire wealth — the world doesn’t really care if someone ever makes it: it’s an individual’s own responsibility, and some circumstances are the result of choices rather than inevitability, or just plain luck. The book may have been more instructive if Desmond had focused on a few more tenants who had succeeded in overcoming their obstacles and transformed their lives for the better rather than primarily on the excruciating minutiae (does anyone really need to know Little the cat got killed because “a car had ground him into the pavement” – page 288?) a microcosm of people in desperate circumstances who were convinced they were doing their best and somehow failing anyway.

⭐ Want to read a sociological treatise on poverty? Didn’t think so. Neither did I, but a Goodreads friend wrote a review that piqued my interest and considering that it takes place in Milwaukee where I lived for 8 years in the 70’s I thought it would be a bit of a stroll down memory lane. Little did I expect that a book on “property management” (eviction, especially) would be a NY Times bestseller, get named one of their top 10 books for 2016 and win a Pulitzer!Truly a powerful piece of research and reportage. Some gave me some insight that had previously escaped me. For example, were you aware that a run-down crappy apartment or home costs as much to rent as one in good shape in a better neighborhood? Why? Because the folks who must rent them are blocked from the better neighborhoods – not enough job stability, too many kids, previous evictions or convictions, etc. In other words, the good neighborhoods don’t want these folks so the demand for housing in the crappy areas is intense. Higher demand, higher prices. How do they get around the “fair housing” laws? Easy, we won’t allow anyone in with legal issues, landlord issues, job or child issues and we apply that to everyone who applies. Gee, which group of people do you think may suffer under those criteria?Let me precis a situation the author presents. A desperate woman grabs a purse while her friend points an unloaded gun at the victim. Naturally, the judge is not sympathetic, nor should he be but the author posits – had you been allowed to keep working 5 days a week at the restaurant, refilling soup pots and mopping up frozen yogurt rather than being cut back to 2 days, you might have been able to save some money and move to a better apartment that was de-leaded and clean and in a neighborhood without drug dealers and having safe schools. You might have been able to get medical care for your son’s seizures and take night classes to become a nurse. Who knows, maybe you actually could become a nurse with a uniform and everything. Then you could give your kids a childhood that would look nothing like the one you had. You could walk this cold city with your head held high and come to feel you were worth something and deserving of a man who could support you other than by lending you a pistol for a stickup or at least one who did not break down your door and beat you in front of your children. Maybe one with a steady job who would be proud to introduce you as his wife!But that is not what happened. What happened was your hours were cut, your electricity was about to be shut off, you and your children were about to be thrown out of your house, and you snatched someone’s purse while your friend pointed a gun at her face. Well, thinks the judge, if poverty caused this crime, who’s to say you won’t do it again? The justice system is no charity, no jobs program, no housing authority. We see the underlying cause. If we cannot pull the weed up from the roots, at least we can cut it low at the stem.The old “for want of a nail” mentioned by Ben Franklin in the 1750’s but may stretch back to 13th century England.A powerful work, well written and well researched. Not only descriptive but prescriptive and a book that will haunt you for a long time to come.

⭐ Read the book in just two sitting. It was engrossing but grim. It saddens me to know that people have to live like this. It also made me fear how close I could be to their situation. I don’t rent but also live pretty close to the financial edge. It is scary to know there are so few safety nets for people. Read all the end notes too. Very well researched and documented. My only quibble was frustration with the bad choices made by some of the evicted tenants. Maybe the solution isn’t with housing itself but with providing a service to educate people on making wiser decisions so to avoid the evictions in the first place. Mothers, especially, who were raised in poverty, need instruction on how to alter their situation so they can stop or slow the ongoing cycle of poverty raising poverty.

⭐ Part of me wonders whether this book has become so popular because the “haves” of the world are buying it as a sort of guilty pleasure, marveling at the squalor of the lives of some of their fellow Americans. Indeed, although Desmond asserts on the back cover that the book is about the “centrality of home” and that eviction/homelessness is its own special problem, the stories in the book point to the real problems faced by many poor Americans: single parenthood, unemployment, drug addiction, and crime. When Desmond recounts multiple cases of behind-on-their rent tenants handing over their welfare checks to pay for friends’ funerals or leaving work to hand out blankets in post-Katrina New Orleans (rather than recognizing that they are in such precarious positions as to require every dime of their own money and every minute of their own time to keep *their own lives* together), it’s hard to imagine most readers sympathizing, rather than shaking their heads at the lifetime of poor decisions that end up in chronic apartment-hopping. It’s hard to imagine an educated person with a full-time job, a home, and an internet connection (to buy this book on Amazon!) thinking that homelessness is these individuals’ main problem, rather than one of the aforementioned difficulties. A good person reads this book and asks himself how to solve the real problems (drugs, single parenthood, etc.), and a less nice person reads this book and thinks uncharitable thoughts about the people in it.Desmond isn’t great with numbers, except when he’s quoting welfare check amounts and rent amounts. However, anyone with any familiarity with the details of life below the poverty line knows he’s not telling the whole story. One example is Arleen, whose welfare payment Desmond mentions; however, her son also has an IEP and is almost certainly receiving SSDI, and that number never makes it into the narrative.Desmond is also big on sentimentalizing poor decision-making. Lamar somehow has money for marijuana, but paying rent on his welfare check is hard. Many of the families in the book have dogs (covering their apartments or trailers in “sh*t,” a word with which Desmond is coarsely free), but struggle to feed their children. Natasha wants to be “free and independent,” but has enough unprotected sex with her boyfriend, Malik, to end up pregnant; her family discourages her from forming a new family unit with Malik and the baby, telling her that they didn’t have daddies, so her kid doesn’t need one, despite the fact that Malik is pulling double shifts to become a responsible father.It’s not hard to do the math. If one welfare check can get a single mother of two or three to eke out an existence, then she could live without fear if her children’s father lived with them and contributed his check. If physicians didn’t prescribe highly addictive opioids to people with back injuries, nurses like Scott wouldn’t become addicts and lose good jobs and good apartments by stealing pain meds from nursing patients. If people like Lamar didn’t raise their families to believe they were “too good” to help with a paint job, but should instead spend their time playing high school football, they might grow up to work (even at an unpleasant and difficult job), rather than subsisting on welfare payments. If interest rates were not ridiculously low, slumlords like Sherrena would not be able to buy up hundreds of decrepit housing units and rent them to desperate families.My heart goes out to the folks in this book. I wish there were more people involved in counseling folks who start going down an unproductive path, and I wish all women respected themselves enough not to give away sex to men who vanish or end up in jail as soon as a baby is created. Even more, I wish people like Matthew Desmond wouldn’t exploit them to make a name for himself in declaring housing a unique problem with causes only policy wonks can remediate. To be sure, human beings have created incentives for bad behavior, and some of these (such as not requiring a certificate of occupancy before a landlord can rent out a roach-infested apartment) can and should be rolled back in cities where they still exist; however, what is required to pull some people out of the problems they’ve created for themselves is human beings genuinely caring about each other and doing more than handing their own family members enough money to make it through the week. Government can’t make that happen. Even churches can’t make that happen. Individual people have to make that happen.

⭐ Understand the hardships of the indigent in seeking a home but the narrative just goes on and on with the same issues and problems. I was hoping for a better understanding of how they got into this unending cycle of misfortunes. I reached the point I anticipated each scenario before he completed each segment. I had read the author who had lived in these dwellings had taken thousands of photos yet not one appears in book. It would paint a far better word picture if illustrations were used of the trailers, apartments, homes, neighborhoods, etc. No need for photos of the families or individuals involved.

⭐ This review is being done at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of American households are facing possible evictions in the near future. I live in a city where this is a very real possibility, and where I am involved as a community activist to try my best to keep any future evictions to a minimum.So, with evictions on my mind, I found this book, thinking that it might be a good overview of the subject, and, in general, have some historic perspectives and data, give some examples of specific evictions, and on and on in this vein. That is not how the book goes. But that does not mean that I did not appreciate the book, for my purposes, in the end. I did and do. I found the book to be a compelling read.Most of the book takes place between May 2008 and December 2009. And the author points out that most poor households pay up to 50% or more for their rent. He also tells us that landlords are the ones that decide who lives where, racially, financially, socially.But, in fact, the first 300 pages of the book pretty much only involve the details of the lives of eight tenant households in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. All of them are very familiar with evictions. Most will face them, over and over again.In many ways, the eight tenant households featured in the book are their own worst enemies. These are not the typical working-class households, who, because of periodic hard times, find themselves behind on rent. No, most of these folks have problems with drugs, mental illness, and all kinds of issues. They are, for the most part, adults who are going nowhere in life, mainly due to no fault but their own.Weaved into all this are details of a landlord couple, who are very good at what they do, are making a ton of money doing it, and love the business they are in. And along the way, there are dozens of gotchas in the book, which, in some ways, is written as a mystery novel that emits clues to its outcome, as it goes.The author devoted several years of his life to the subject of evictions and writing the book. In kind of a Barbara Ehrenreich thing (“Nickel and Dimed”), he actually lived in the trailer park, named the College Home Mobile Park, for several months, where much of the action takes place. He describes the area as “the part of Milwaukee where poor white folks lived.” Milwaukee at that time was on the list of one of the most segregated cities in the U.S.He drove some of the renters around the city, looking for new apartments to rent, as they lacked cars or other vehicles. He got to know them, and they came to trust him. Actually, they, for the most part, were so up to their ears in drama and personal issues that they did not have any time to wish him harm or really figure him out. They knew he was writing a book, and that they were the subjects. They knew that he came from another world. They also had no time to try to figure out inequality. They only knew it for a fact.Also in the mix of the first 300 pages is the owner of the trailer park. He, like the landlord couple featured, is making a ton of money, and his relationships with his tenants is of interest. They know that he is rich, off their backs, but they seem to wish him no ill will. They respect him for who he is and what he has to do. The owner prides himself on being able to make good money off his tenants, in one of the city’s poorest trailer park. Somewhat frequently, tenants would leave their trailers behind, as they left, one way or the other. The owner would then reclaim them, as “abandoned property,” and be free to rent them to others, which he did.This owner found himself, as a result of his business, in the top one percent of earner households, knowing that most of his tenants were in the bottom ten percent. He earned roughly $500,000 after all expenses.Looking back through the book, I can remember the various tenants that have been introduced. Most live in the trailer park, but not all. Some know each other, but not all know each other. Most have kids, which makes the stress of keeping a roof over one’s head more stressful. Most with kids fear losing their kids to Protective Services.There are several evictions detailed. On the day of the event, the Sheriff would arrive with a gun, as the moving guys pulled up, this all being done by court order. If the tenant was present, the tenant would be given a choice: truck or curb. Truck meant taking the furniture and other goods to a storage place, where the tenant would have to pay monthly for storage, then a good hunk of money to get the stuff out of storage. Per the author, about 70% of those having items sent to storage never get it back. They are not allowed to take some things out, unless they are fully paid up on the storage unit.At the eviction site, the tenant has he choices of what to have removed and what to be sent to storage, or what is to be left behind. The landlord, then, has the choice of removing or retaining the remaining items. Many times, the tenants would already have left the unit, and would not be there when the eviction was in progress. What they left behind would be salvaged by the landlord or the moving company, or just sent to the dump. No questions asked.One story told was that of a man who asked the movers to give him a last minute inside his house. Once inside, he shot himself to death.I told you there were gotchas.The moving guys could do several moves per day. They could clean out a place within an hour. Again, they would commonly not be on the hook to take everything. The landlord would be involved in those decisions, because, in many cases, she would have already the unit rented to another group. One of the rules of the trade, per one of the moving guys, was to never open the refrigerator. You do not want to know what might be inside, or how it smelled.Many times, after the eviction, the tenants had only a shelter to go to. There, they would try to get themselves together and to start the process of finding their next home. Sometimes, tenants would meet other tenants there in the shelter and decide to combine incomes in their search for a new place to rent.At that time, in Milwaukee, there was a dwindling supply of very low-cost rentals, so tenants might have to make up to 100 calls and look at dozens of units before finding their next home. Landlords always asked about prior evictions, but sometimes chose to ignore these. Sometimes the tenants just plain got lucky. But, most of the time, the group featured in the book would find a way to face eviction again.There are also many stories about how tenants needing money would lean on friends or family. But they could not always go after the same persons. And, at times, they decided they would rather be evicted that beg for money, again. In one case, a woman decided to be evicted, rather than sell her jewelry, even though she knew that would raise enough money to avoid eviction. And then there were always the stalling techniques, like that money was coming soon to enable the tenant to pay the rent, even when that was not true.There is also the story of how neighbors might bring lawn chairs out to witness the eviction, to not miss the details of the event. And after an eviction at the trailer park, it was common for other tenants to go to the then-vacant unit to scavenge what was left.To the credit of the landlord couple in the book, they had no interest, for the most part, in evicting anyone. They would come for their rent, in person, so they got to know their tenants well. They would accept partial payments, at times, hear the hardship stories, but remain firm, like a parent to a child, in warning the tenants of their fate, if they screwed up or got too far behind in rent.Evictions commonly resulted following police calls and/or incidents with other tenants. Many of the rental sites had multiple units. If one tenant caused disturbances with another, one had to go. If there were too many police calls, or if city inspectors found the unit to be uninhabitable, due to conditions caused by the tenants, they probably had to go.At the same time, the landlords in the story had their flaws. They were not always quick to respond to complaints, a common one being of water not draining. In some cases, this was due to old pipes; in other cases, the plumber would blame the stoppage on grease or other food debris being poured down a sink. Sometimes there would be no hot water. But the landlord couple had money, and they frequently took trips, like to Jamaica. They would be out of town. They also liked to gamble, to spend money. Like I said above, they were good at what they did. They liked to think that they had the right to enjoy the profits.In some cases, it was disclosed that the landlord would move ahead with an eviction, knowing that she may be on the brink of selling the property, and wanting the current tenants out, before she sold. One property had a huge fire. The landlord simply used the fire-insurance money to buy another place.Landlords hate code violations and city inspectors. They cost landlords money. And tenants know that they risk an eviction if they call for inspections.This landlord couple prided themselves on buying rental property that would yield a positive cash flow from the start. In one case, they actually sold a property, at an inflated price, to a tenant, who was under a first-time-buyers’ program. When the new owner defaulted, the landlords bought the place back, at a nice discount.In the process of an eviction, there is, of course, a court proceeding. In most cases, the tenants do not show up, so the landlord wins by default. And there are other ways to get tenants out, like paying them to leave, or taking off the front door, or sending some goons over to threaten them, if they do not leave on their own.The name of the evil, successful landlord, who is Black, is Sherrena, which made me think of the evil Cruella De Vil of Disney fame. She sees evictions as a regular part of her business. Her story reveals that she bought her first rental in 1999, when prices were low, refinanced it some years later, to have a down payment for the next rental. Four years later, she owned 46 units. She found the banks more than willing to lend her to buy more and more But, she was always ready to tenants who were having trouble paying their rents that she had “mortgages to pay.”She and her husband called themselves “inter-city entrepreneurs.”The book points out that the profession of property managers has exploded over the past 40 years, and that the number of books on the subject was very limited before about 1975, after which it exploded, as well. In line with this, the book follows Sherrena to some property manager association meetings, where she is very active in giving advice to other landlords. She is seen as one of them who they can learn the latest tricks of the trade from.An interesting historical disclosure in the book is that it was common after WWII for landlords to turn away families with children and to evict when someone was pregnant. The Fair Housing Act in 1968 set many of the rules we now find common, but, per the book, it did not define families with children as a “protected” class.Also, after WWII, the federal government made homeownership for white families a priority, but not for Blacks. Landlords were quick to discover that profits could be made from rental units in slums. And even today, rental prices may not differ much between “good” areas and “bad” areas. Again, it is the landlords who decide who lives where, as well as what the prices for the rentals in each area should be.Near the end of the book, the author makes the points that “The home is the wellspring of personhood” and that “The home remains the primary basis for life.” He goes on to say that this is the basis of “civic life.” But low-income families, commonly, move much more frequently than those with higher incomes. This is disruptive in many ways, including that their kids change schools, frequently. One woman featured in the book, with her kids, moved, on average of about once per year for many, many years.Color is also involved. Black households are the most likely to be evicted, followed by Hispanics. And most who are evicted have children in the household. The author says that much of this is unnecessary. He points out that about 1/3 of renter households receive some form of government financial help; 2/3 do not. And, he says, legal assistance to the poor has been dwindling for at least a decade.He says, “In theory, you could solve the problem by expanding public housing, tax credits, homeowner initiatives, or developer incentives.” But, he says, each of these have their limitations. He is clearly for reasonable rent controls and reasonable returns on investments for landlords.The author says that he studies the subject of poverty as a graduate student. He was fascinated on poverty and its relationships to other things. This led him to focus on evictions. He soon moved into the trailer park, where he lived in a trailer without hot water. He could never get the landlord to fix the problem.He found himself to be a bit of a field worker, one who was constantly overanalyzing things. He found a surprising lack of data or research to help him with the subject of evictions. He found he was needing to come up with such data on his own, by living among those who he could extract the data. He assumes what he learned in Milwaukee is applicable to most other American cities.In summary, I think that this may prove to be an important book, historically and culturally. It tells many of us a great deal about a subject we do not know much about. I recommend that others read it, as well.

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