In such an environment, the incentive to lower the rent, forgive a late payment, or spruce up your property was extremely low.” Nationwide, vacancy rates for low-cost units have fallen to single digits … The high demand for the cheapest housing told landlords that for every family in a unit, there were scores behind them ready to take their place.

“In Milwaukee and cities across the country,” Desmond writes, “as affordable rental stock has been allowed to deteriorate and eventually disappear, low-income families have rushed to occupy cheap units. To write the book, Desmond spent more than a year living in two of Milwaukee’s most impoverished neighborhoods and interviewing residents. Evicted offers an in-depth, heart-rending look at eight families caught in the struggle to find decent, affordable housing in the city. His focus is Milwaukee, a city he got to know while in graduate school in nearby Madison. In Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, out this month from the Crown Publishing Group, Desmond compellingly focuses on the ways race, class, and gender intersect with housing loss. When Harvard sociology professor and 2015 MacArthur Fellow Matthew Desmond moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to study housing policy, homelessness, and the politics of eviction, he came to a conclusion that startled him: “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women.

For more coverage on housing justice, check out our Special Report.

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