April's Not Fiction Book Discussions

The phrase "there's no place like home" can be read in two ways. The most common reading is positive, with the suggestion that home is the most satisfying place to be. However, one could also understand the phrase to suggest that there is no place to be found that feels like home.  Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond  follows eight families in Milwaukee, WI, as they look for a place to call home and the obstacles they encounter along the way.

Desmond, a Harvard sociologist and MacArthur Genius grant recipient, spent time living in a trailer park where tenants were threatened with a mass eviction due to livability issues and in a rooming house in an urban neighborhood. He interviewed and observed the tenants and their landlords, as well as city and court officials, interweaving his own ethnographic research with statistics and studies of poverty in America. Desmond told Gillian B. White at The Atlantic,

I wanted to try to write a different poverty book, to focus on not just a place or a group of people, but a set of relationships. I thought eviction was the best way to do that. It brings landlords and judges and tenants together in this process that you can follow over time. I realized not only that we had overlooked this very central aspect of poverty, but eviction was coursing through the American city and acting as a cause, not just a condition of poverty.

Although eviction is the main topic Desmond explores, he shows us through the stories he tells that the lack of affordable housing intersects with many other social issues, such as parenting, education, employment, and addiction, as well as with race and gender. Desmond shows us with remarkable concision and empathy that these relationships are complicated.

What do you think? It is easy to judge people who get evicted as the victims of nothing but their own poor decisions. Did you feel this way before reading Evicted? Has your opinion changed after reading the book? How? Desmond uses storytelling to help us understand the larger issue of poverty and eviction. Whose story were you most drawn to and why? How do you see other social issues interacting with the lack of affordable housing in these people's lives? What responsibilities do you think landlords should have when renting their property? What risks do they take? Are profits justified in the private rental market when there is a significant lack of affordable housing? In his Epilogue, Desmond proposes solutions to the suffering caused by eviction. Do you believe that his solutions would work? Why or why not? Do you believe, as Desmond does, that access to a decent home is a basic human right? Did reading Evicted inspire you to want to help others in positions similar to those of the people in the book? If so, what do you think would help and how do you plan to get involved?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, April 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, April 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.