Street roots., July 08, 2016, Page 4, Image 4

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Street Roots • July 8-14, 2016
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PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MACARTHUR FOUNDATION, CC-BY
Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” is a 2015 recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” grant.
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Our indefensible eviction problem
In his research for his best seller, ‘Evicted’ author Matthew Desmond spent time with
tenants and landlords, chronicling the struggle to obtain and keep stable housing
BY WAYNE BRAVERMAN
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
t I Ahe government has been telling
people the economy is making a
A steady but slow recovery from the
Great Recession. In the past few years, the
unemployment rate has mostly suggested a
rosy picture of job growth. GDP has slowly
improved. The housing market has heated ,
up. The Federal Reserve shows enough
cautious confidence in economic growth
that it has raised interest rates once and
may do it again soon.
But for many people, the story of an
improved economy may as well be a fairy
tale. According to the Pew Research Center,
for the first time in more than four decades,
the middle class now consists of less than
50 percent of the American population. In
2015, 20 percent of American adults were in
the lowest income tier, up from 16 percent
in 1971, living at or below the poverty line.
Many people who have lost their jobs and
have exhausted their unemployment
benefits (often referred to as the
“uncounted” in the distorted statistics) are
forced to settle for low-paying jobs, many
without benefits. Others have simply given
up looking for work.
On top of all this, many people are still
losing their homes. According to the
National Alliance to End Homelessness, 17.7
out of every 10,000 people were homeless
in 2015. The Alliance reports that the
number of households paying more than 50
percent of their income toward housing rose
to 6.6 million in 2014 - a 2.1 percent
increase from 2013.
Matthew Desmond, an associate
professor of sociology at Harvard University,
has brought to light one of the most
alarming and least talked-about signs that
many Americans are suffering economic
hardship in his recently released book,
“Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the
American City.”
“Evicted” focuses on poverty and
inequality in the United States through the
eyes of eight low-income families and a
couple of landlords in Milwaukee, Wise.
This is more than a thoroughly
researched study of the plight of housing for
the poor. It is a compelling, vivid look into a
sad, difficult world typically shoved out of
the sight and minds of most Americans.
“We in America haven’t invested in
decent, affordable housing for low-income .
families,” said Desmond, who points out
evictions, which were once a rarity, are now
“acute.”
Desmond, co-director of the Justice and
Poverty Project at Harvard, has spent eight
years looking at the many different aspects
of evictions.
It’s a subject that is also personal. Money
was tight in his own family growing up. His
dad was a pastor, and his mom worked a
variety of jobs to help bring in money. It
was during his college days at Arizona State
University that his family in Winslow, Ariz.,
lost their home to foreclosure.
Desmond wrote of his family’s hardship:
“I remember being deeply sad and
embarrassed. I didn’t know how to make
sense of it.”
He continued in the book about coping
with his family’s eviction: “Once back on
campus, I found myself spending weekends
helping my girlfriend build houses with
Habitat for Humanity.”
Desmond also spent time with the many
homeless people who congregate in the Mill
Avenue area of Tempe, a city in Maricopa
County, Ariz.
It was during his graduate school days at
the University of Wisconsin, Madison, that
Desmond’s attention turned to research to
understand the link between housing and
See EVICTED, page 5