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Overall Summary

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City was published in 2016. It won a Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and it’s about the lives of people living with extreme poverty. The book is divided into three major sections with eight chapters each. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of life that these individuals face when they’re evicted from their homes. After this section, there is an epilogue called “Home and Hope” which discusses what can be done to help those who are struggling financially around the world.

As an undergraduate at Arizona State University, Desmond became interested in the subject of eviction. He discovered that there was no statistical data or studies on the topic, so he decided to do his own research. As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin Madison, he lived among poverty-stricken renters in Milwaukee and studied both poor people and rich people involved with evictions.

Desmond spends a significant amount of time detailing two landlords. One is Sherrena Tarver, who owns rental property worth millions of dollars and has become an entrepreneur from nothing. She seems like the American Dream at first, but as the narrative progresses readers discover that she’s willing to do anything to extract money from people around her: tenants and employees. At the same time, she sees herself as a victim of whatever forces are surrounding her—tenants, building inspectors, employees or legal systems. The other landlord is Tobin Charney who also owns houses worth millions of dollars. He doesn’t pretend his tenants are anything more than a means to an end: money.

Desmond follows a variety of low-income families to demonstrate the effects of poverty and eviction. He visits Arleen Belle, who is constantly plagued by bad luck and Crystal Mayberry, who has an IQ of 70. Lamar Richards was a double amputee trying to make ends meet for his family but could not do so. The Hinkston family lived in “The Rathole” which became more unlivable as time progressed.

In this book, there are many people who are not able to escape poverty. One of them is Pam Reinke and her four daughters. She was evicted from a trailer park on the South Side by Charney. Another one is Lorraine Warren, a woman in her fifties who lives with various men throughout the story because she can’t afford her own place or even food at times. Scott Bunker, a former nurse and drug addict in his late thirties eventually escapes poverty after living with his brother for awhile and getting another job as an orderly at the hospital where he used to work before being fired for stealing drugs from patients’ rooms.

There are many forces that work against the tenants in this book. First and foremost, landlords don’t like it because they make money off of their tenants. Beyond that, however, assistance programs fail the poor because they’re not always helpful to them. The legal system is another force working against these people as well as eviction processes and police who never seem to be on their side when they need help most. The toll all of this takes on society is tremendous with issues such as crime rates going up while education levels go down for children living in poverty. It’s not just the big picture issues either but also little things such as a mother telling her son his life was punishment for being homeless or a woman watching her boyfriend beat her daughters while chanting racist slurs at them.

This book looks at the issue of eviction and what should be done to help people who are evicted. It includes stories from people who have been evicted, as well as statistics and historical information about eviction. The author also interviews a few experts on the subject, but ultimately he doesn’t offer any solutions or real hope for these families. In the Epilogue, however, he does give his opinion on what should be done about this problem. He thinks that everyone deserves safe and stable housing; legal resources need to be made available to renters during their eviction hearings; more government funding is needed for housing vouchers; rent prices must be controlled by law; and laws need to change so landlords can’t evict tenants just because they want their apartment back or because they don’t like them.