Revisiting “Evicted” by Matthew Desmond
In New York Times best-seller “Evicted”, Matthew Desmond examines contemporary poverty through the struggles of the evicted in urban and rural Milwaukee. “Residential stability,” reflects Desmond, “begets a kind of psychological stability, which allows people to invest in their home and social relationships” (296). Desmond’s descriptive ethnography follows two land-lords and eight low-income families throughout the eviction process. There’s Lamar, a paraplegic, who rents a duplex unit mistakingly thinking he would be receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI). There’s Crystal, who after calling the police for physically abused neighborhoods, is evicted and after repeatedly calling the police on a neighbor being abused by a boyfriend, turns to prostitution. In writing of landlord-tenant relationships, Desmond concludes, “Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out the poverty debate. It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets…”. While Desmond’s ethnography seeks to portray the exploitation of low-income citizens, his descriptive portrayal of the urban evicted largely fails to situate poverty in light of historic structural racism .
According to a study by Brown University and the University of Florida, Milwaukee continues to be one of the most segregated cities in America. On top of exclusionary zoning, Milwaukee’s landscape is characterized by historic restrictive covenants and debased lending practices that physically isolated African Americans in low-income urban communities and prevented them from buying property. Nevertheless, Desmond does not discuss the historic racial segregation that has characterized his subjects’ experiences in the urban communities until chapter 20, a seeming afterthought. Only noting fraught New Deal policies, lack of suitable urban housing, and exploited private market transactions, his discussion of structural housing segregation is incomplete. Desmond writes, “Over three centuries of systematic dispossession from the land created a semi-permanent black rental class and an artificially high demand for inner-city apartments”. However, it was not rental exploitation alone that perpetuated African American poverty in urban centers.
Richard Rothstein’s research in “The Color of Law’’ extends our understanding of the racially-enforced policies that created the present-day urban communities where Desmond’s African American subjects sought housing. Rothstein describes how to prevent African Americans from residing in middle-class neighborhoods, zoning ordinances were enacted “ to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford. . . there was also enough open racial intent behind exclusionary zoning that it is integral to the story of de jure segregation”. In this understanding, not only did racial policies exploit the urban neighborhoods that African American families, such as Crystal’s, took refuge in — they overwhelmingly created the American ghetto. Barred from suburbs, African American neighborhoods became characterized by blight and poverty as industry move in and banks refused to issue home mortgages. “The creation of racial ghettos was self-perpetuating,” understands Rothstein, “residence in a community where economic disadvantage is concentrated itself depresses disposable income, which makes departure more difficult”. In this omission of the structural legacy of residential segregation, Desmond overlooks a key cause of concentrated poverty for urban African Americans and relies on contemporary, “Eviction itself, [to explain] why some families lived on safe streets and others on dangerous ones, why some children attend good schools and others failing ones”.
Desmond’s narrow examination of historic housing inequality creates a fragmented portrayal of contemporary African American housing disparities. Accordingly, Desmond’s subjects’ struggles, both black and white, with poverty seem to be unequivocally equal throughout the first half of the book. A convoluted “generic poverty” arises where subjects’ lives, both black and white, are only characterized by the tensions of present-day systems of “extractive markets” and individual agency in the eviction process, not their racial history. “Eviction is a cause,” reverberates Desmond, “not just a condition, of poverty”. In this framing, Desmond dangerously puts the onus on the well-being of low-income residents on mere modern “extractive markets”, specifically landlords, with the continual understanding, “From thousands of yes/no [landlord] decisions emerged a geography of advantage and disadvantage that characterized the modern American city: good schools and failing ones, safe streets and dangerous ones. . . why crime and gang activity or an area’s civic engagement and its of neighborliness could vary drastically from one block to the next”. Accordingly, in contrast to numerous white subjects like Scott, who is described as losing his livelihood to addiction, Desmond’s ethnography is unable to locate the source of poverty in African American subjects and overlooks how “[African American] economic status is commonly replicated in the next generation, so once government prevented African Americans fully participating in the mid-twentieth-century, free labor market [due to segregation], depressed incomes became, for many, a multi-generational trait”.
In his failure to situate to situate poverty in light of historical structural housing discrimination, specifically exclusionary zoning, Desmond misses the opportunity to examine the causes of generational poverty in the urban African American community. What is more, Desmond’s insistence on a universal housing voucher ignores the historical evidence that the well-intentioned policy could function insofar to replicate historical segregation patterns that “Evicted” dismisses. His policy recommendation is thus subject to his own advice to “[uncover] the ironies and inefficiencies that arise when policy makers try to help poor families without understanding the root causes of their poverty”.
