Evicted: This is literally the richest country in the world

Author: Matthew Desmond

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Everyone who lives in America should read this book. This should be required reading for all high school students, all university students, everyone who is elected to a public office, I don’t care if it’s city, county, state or federal, they should have to read this book.

In the project that spawned this book, Matthew Desmond  spent about a year in 2008-2009 living in low-income parts of Milwaukee and getting to know the residents there, following their lives and documenting their struggles mostly around finding a secure place to live. He spent time in both a mostly-white trailer park in a mostly white part of the city as well as a mostly-black neighbourhood in a mostly-black part of the city, and spoiler alert, unofficial segregation plays a big part in this book.

I think the power of this book is in is mostly narrative format. It follows these families and tells their stories both the good and the bad. The way he documents the experience of these families humanises them in a way that statistical reports or shorter newspaper items on housing insecurity would find it hard to do.

I came away from this book angry at landlords, the government and the world for allowing this injustice in the richest country in the world. Not only do we get a raw look at poverty, which I think is hard for people to fully grasp without experiencing it themselves, but we also get a look at how the systems of eviction courts, housing benefits, private rentals and law enforcement seem designed to keep people in a state of poverty and insecurity.

The way this is written is so masterful because he gives the reader information in a manner and an order that non-judgemental and matter-of-fact but also deeply moving to anyone with an ounce of humanity without being melodramatic. And there are some characters—real people—who he’s clearly very careful to reveal certain information about in a certain order, so you start the book feeling one way about them, and then at the end you’re just like “what the hell just happened?”

This book was moving and informative, and is a brilliant example of the power of good journalism as well as the failure of American socio-political powers in enabling people to achieve the American dream.