Evicted

(by Matthew Desmond)

This book (which was published in 2016 and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2017) follows eight families/households in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009. These families/households either have experienced/are experiencing eviction, or are living under threat of it. Some live in Milwaukee’s (mostly Black) North Side; others live in a trailer park “on the far South Side of the city” – “the part of Milwaukee where poor white folks lived.” The author, it turns out, lived in the trailer park himself for four months while researching this book; he also lived on the North Side, and the North Side landlord who features in the book was his landlord for that time.

There is a whole lot in this book, from scenes of daily life to policy recommendations. The writing is very good, and the scenes of daily life are often moving, but I didn’t love the structure, which jumps around a lot, which left me struggling at times to remember who certain people were or what had been happening to them in previous chapters. I guess the discontinuity of the narrative fits with the chaos that eviction causes in people’s lives—at one point we’re told that one kid in the book “had attended five different schools” for seventh and eighth grade, as if seventh and eighth grade aren’t hard enough when you’re not switching schools that often or dealing with the stress of not having a stable place to live. But I still would have preferred to read something more linear.

One thing I learned that struck me as particularly rotten: some cities have laws about “nuisance” 911 calls (e.g. where a landlord can get fined if there are more than a certain number of 911 calls from a single address in a certain time period). This can result in people getting evicted for calling 911, which can discourage people from calling 911 to get help for themselves or a neighbor who needs it, e.g. if someone is experiencing domestic violence. These laws are, in some cases, being modified to try to make things less awful in this regard, but there can still be issues. At one point in this book, one of the women has a property manager tell her off for calling 911 (“We can’t have police coming up in here”)— and she wasn’t even calling the police, but rather calling for an ambulance because one of her kids was having a bad asthma attack.