Having a roof over your head

Every day, hundreds of thousands of Americans are evicted or removed from their homes. Last week I read a fascinating book. Evicted:  Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond.  He is a research professor at Princeton University. The book takes place in Milwaukee - Wisconsin, as Desmond writes, an astonishing number of one in eight renters were forced to move in just a twenty-four months period.  

As insane as those numbers are to all of us, Evicted is a book essentially about people, not numbers or statistics.   This book explains how many Americans live in poverty, something that most of us could not personally understand.  So we can only learn about it by reading about it.  Evicted truly gave me a better understanding of what it is like to be very poor and disadvantaged in this country than anything else I have read or ever grasped.  

The author spent almost two years living in two extremely high-poverty areas in Milwaukee - one predominantly white and the other mostly black and getting to know the residents of those neighborhoods and writing about their lives.  I met many personalities in the book, landlords, renters, judges, Sheriffs, court clerks, lawyers and many others. And the book is written in a way that it describes them without being judgemental in any way.  Desmond helped me understand why people make the choices they make.  Although the specifics of their lives are unlike anything, I have seen or experienced, but somehow the book makes it easy to empathize with them and understand their struggles.  

As it is in the title, much of the book is about how troublesome it is to find and keep a house when you live in very harsh and severe poverty.  Let me give you a sense of how things work; most housing experts believe the ideal is to contribute approximately 30 percent of the household income on housing, but in Evicted Desmond tells us most low-income families have to give over 50 percent on a home, and for very unlucky ones it is about 70 percent.  Just imagine paying that much to keep a roof over your head,  that means there is almost no room for bad luck in life.   It also means a single adverse incident can make you homeless instantly.  

Evicted is not just focusing on housing.  It is the dramatic representation of how problems of poverty are intertwined.  So think about it.  When someone in that situation has to look for a new home to live, they most likely will miss work, which cuts back on their pay and makes them more likely to get suspended or fired from their jobs.  Image how all these instabilities will impact families, particularly children. Eviction is really about people's vulnerability, desperation, inability but also courage and determination.  

As an American but really as a citizen of the world I always wanted to learn more about how people move up the economic ladder - it is also called mobility from poverty.  Evicted helped me understand one very important piece of the puzzle, and it makes me want to learn more about the systemic difficulties that make housing unaffordable, but the various government programs designed to help.

The book also briefly covers the history of public housing in America. It shows how big government-run projects are mostly a thing of the past, and today most poor people live in private housing projects.  But since funding hasn't kept up with the need, the book explains the only twenty-five percent of families that qualify for aid paying their rent to get any.  The wait list for a housing voucher is often measured not in months or even years, but sometimes in decades.  

Desmond's book raises one crucial question that it doesn't quite answer:  How can low-income neighborhoods have cheap real estate and vacant houses, but still, lack decent, affordable homes?  Has it anything to do with limiting zoning and stringent building codes that might drive up the price of even an average home in the city?  

Next time you walk or drive through one of the low-income neighborhoods think about these questions.  In the meantime, Evicted is well worth reading for anyone who wants to better understand poverty in the US.  It is fantastically written, thought-provoking and impressive.