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Award-Winning Author Explains Why the Affordable Housing Crisis Threatens Our Society

Sociologist Matthew Desmond wanted to know what happened to families when they were evicted from their homes—and what sorts of repercussions were felt in their communities. So he set out to find the answers.

The result is the Pulitzer Prize–winning book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” in which Desmond tells the stories of eight Milwaukee individuals and families struggling to pay their rent. He began his research in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, moving into a mostly white trailer park and later into a rooming house in a predominantly black community in the Midwestern city.

What he found was a system especially clogged with the evictions of women—predominantly poor and black. Their stories were moving. Take Arlene, who fell behind on her rent after she spent much of her public assistance on helping to cover her sister’s funeral costs. That ultimately led her and her two sons to be evicted from their two-bedroom apartment just before Christmas.

The book was a “deeply researched exposé that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty,” according to the Pulitzer website.

Desmond, now a professor at Harvard, recently discussed with realtor.com^® what he learned about poverty, the toll that evictions take on families, and what he believes needs to be done to address the problem.

The interview below has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

Q: Why did you write this book?

A: We have a lot of poverty in the United States. I wanted to understand the link between housing and poverty. We didn’t know much about it.

The book shows the difficulty of reaching some sort of financial stability without a stable, affordable home. Housing is just so central to the lives of all of us.

Q: What were your biggest takeaways?

A: The evidence is overwhelming that eviction isn’t just a condition of poverty. It’s a cause of it.

If you look at the data, you see women, especially low-income, African-American women, are evicted at incredibly high rates. In Milwaukee, among renters, 1 in 5 black women is evicted at some point in her life. It was 1 in 15 for white women renters.

That’s when I began thinking of eviction as the feminine equivalent of incarceration. The face of our eviction epidemic is mothers with children. And it’s especially pronounced in low-income communities of color.

I had no idea that evictions were so prevalent. You crunch the numbers, and you see that 1 in 8 renters in Milwaukee is displaced once every two years. New York City sees 60 marshal evictions every day. I didn’t expect eviction to be such a force in people’s lives and [create] so much fallout.

Q: Why did you center on Milwaukee’s housing market?

A: The story of the American city was being written on the margins. We pay a lot of attention to cities we think have been our biggest successes, like New York City.

But when you write a book about Milwaukee, you have a shot at representing families in cities all across America. Milwaukee [is a former manufacturing city] resembling Cleveland and Indianapolis. The postindustrial age that Milwaukee so clearly represents is important to the broader American poverty story.

Q: How important is housing, particularly to lower-income Americans?

A: It’s foundational. Without stable, affordable shelter, everything else falls apart.

Most Americans think the typical low-income family lives in public housing. But the opposite is true.

Today, only about 1 in 4 families who qualify for public housing [receives it]. Instead, 1 in 4 poor, renting families are spending 70% of their income just on rent and utilities.

One thing Arlene [the mother who was evicted before Christmas] did, once her housing situation finally got stabilized years later, was she started applying for jobs. The thing she was most proud of was, her youngest son could go to the same school for several years. She wants to thrive and work and contribute, and she wants the best for her sons.

Q: What are the larger implications of eviction?

A: If you get evicted, you have a 20% higher likelihood of losing your job within 12 months. It’s such an overwhelming stressful event that it can cause you to make mistakes at work.

I’m thinking of a woman I met in the trailer park named Tina. She had to miss several days of work [at a call center] to go to court to dispute her landlord. She was just getting so stressed out about her living situation. Eventually she just broke down crying at work and had to leave work earlier. She was evicted. She relocated to a place farther away from her job. She had an unreliable car that ultimately broke down. She missed work [because of that] and was eventually fired.

When your life is consumed with housing searches, you just don’t have a lot of time or energy to apply for jobs. And if you’re homeless and you lack an address, it’s a barrier [to finding employment].

Q: How big is the affordable housing problem in our nation, particularly as rents and home prices are rising?

A: It’s one of the biggest domestic problems facing America today. If we want to be a country with less inequality and we want to do a serious job of confronting childhood poverty and [educational inequality], then we have to get serious about expanding access to affordable housing.

This isn’t just an issue for low-income Americans. About 1 in 5 American renters pays at least 50% of their income on housing.

This is a young person’s issue. This is an employer’s issue.

Q: How much can just one eviction hurt a renter?

A: It can prevent families from moving into public housing [as it can serve as a black mark against their applications in some cases]. That eviction record can badly hurt your credit.

One eviction—the mark of it, the blemish of it can be quite consequential.

Q: What should be done to ensure everybody has safe and adequate housing?

A: It doesn’t matter what [social issues] we care about; our lack of affordable housing is crucial. If we care about [government] spending, we can choose to spend money on homelessness or we can choose to spend money on housing. We can spend it in a much smarter way and a much more humane way.

We need a more serious [financial] investment on a federal, state, and local level. We have programs that work. Public housing works pretty darn well. Housing vouchers work pretty darn well.

Families that are subsidized live in better neighborhoods and don’t move as much. We don’t need to outsmart this problem. We don’t need newfangled stuff. We need a more serious investment [in public housing and housing voucher programs].

Neighborhoods with more evictions have higher rates of violent crime the following year. When there’s a high amount of churn in our neighborhoods, and neighbors remain strangers, that’s a decent breeding ground for higher crime.

Real choices I saw in Milwaukee were, ‘Should I buy food or pay for housing?’

When families finally get a housing voucher after years on the waiting list, they do one consistent thing. They buy more food. Their kids become stronger and healthier and less anemic [as a result].

Q: What surprised you about the people in Milwaukee?

A: The thing that left the biggest impression on me when I was in Milwaukee was how brilliant and generous and spunky people could be in the face of adversity. We have stereotypes about poor people, about how they’re lazy and don’t want to work. It just doesn’t resonate with my experiences.

If we’re serious about expanding the American dream, we have to get serious about allowing [poor individuals and families] to root in a community and experience the benefits of a home.

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