"Evicted": The Best Thing to Read Right Now

I'm not sure whether it's the right thing to read right now, or the exactly the wrong thing. You can't say it's uplifting, and there's little about what's going on right now to be uplifted about. But it's probably the most affective.

The book is called Evicted, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. Not hard to see why. It's a topic people don't want to face, but this man has faced it many times. It's not a lark. The author, Matthew Desmond, is an expert in it. He's done research beyond this writing and written lots of journal articles.

It's a work where you need to keep one finger back at the endnotes. They are sometimes long and intensely detailed. Desmond goes all the way back to Jacob Riis, the famous author/photographer, who detailed these kinds of live among mostly immigrants more than a hundred years ago, to make his points. The notes add a depth to the account that leaves you wondering about this lowly class of individuals, by no means all one color of skin.

It's the racket--and I don't use that word loosely--of the rental business in the inner city. He chose Milwaukee as the prime example, and after reading the work, I can see why.

Thing is, it's a ten-minute drive from where I live, relatively well, in a neighborhood that's well-to-do. A nice park is four blocks away. Removing the virus for a minute, businesses are literally a block away. There's money here; they'll come back. An excellent hospital takes a ten-minute walk. I don't live lavishly, but there is money at the end of the month. Economically, I have little to complain about.

In the world of Evicted, though, everybody lives on the edge. People can't meet their expenses. They work at menial jobs, rarely full-time, that don't pay well. When the first of the month comes, reckoning comes with it. Sometimes they try hard to live within their means, sometimes they just can't. Certain habits just catch up with them.

That's what Desmond does best: He explains the mentality behind poverty. And some of that explanation makes no sense to middle class people, who are used to saving some money for a rainy day. Every day is rainy to these people. They need to feel better right now, so they waste what they could pay for their rent for things like shoes, over-sized TV sets, and jewelry. They'll deal with tomorrow, tomorrow. Conservatives grind down on that thinking; liberals excuse and overlook it. Both are dehumanizing, Desmond says. Neither deals with the core issues.

Meanwhile, landlords cut every edge to gain the profits they believe they have coming to them, guided only by ceilings provided by law. Permission to stay a little longer, though owing money, is given capriciously. Sometimes people can work off their debts, but not always. Like elsewhere in the job market, there are only so many skills to go around to fit so many tasks. There is no standard on individual charity.

Landlords can be cruel and cutthroat. One was called back from a night at the casino; a fire had broken out in one of her properties. She saw the body of an eight-month-old infant carried away, but she had only two thoughts: Would she have to give back any of the monthly rent; and how much insurance money could she collect? Not a thought about the couple that had lost the child.

Government, at least government in Wisconsin, has had it with these people. If they really are evicted, they literally have no place to go with their things. They used to have them shrink-wrapped for storage and have to pay to pick them up. No more: The state has now eliminated that requirement. Their things are left on the curb if they haven't made earlier arrangements.

People scramble and scrape. They sheepishly approach relatives and friends. They call charitable organizations. They hustle. Some sell drugs. Some go into prostitution.

This is not a gateway to great self-esteem. When you can't work or get laid off, it's humiliating. Some people cover for it, some can't. Some are mentally challenged and need the kind of help that's stretched very thin.

Going to court is its own revelation. Knowing why someone can't meet their debt becomes irrelevant. Rubber stamps get busy; you hear them land on papers with the coldness of officialdom. Sometimes the renters show up, sometimes they don't. I didn't know this, but as opposed to flat-out criminal cases, renters don't have the right to procure legal defenses. (The Supreme Court said so in 1981; it may be time to revisit that.) So many go without, with predictable results. You can see why a renter subjected to this doesn't show up a second time. The landlord wants the money; the money's not there. It doesn't matter why. Nobody's interested in listening.

This living on the edge, this unending tension, creates a mentality of endless stress. Issues emerge that wouldn't with other folks. They get into fights and squabbles. Being nice sometimes backfires. You have to be a 'bitch' sometimes, or the system and the culture trample you.

No wonder they're seizing this opportunity, with the horrible police homicide of George Floyd, to demonstrate in the richer parts of some towns--in Buckhead, just outside of Atlanta, and in Whitefish Bay, a.k.a. White Folks Bay, just north of here, where I used to live. They're bringing their world into one that's quite divorced from it. They're saying, Look at us. Just look. We're here, too. This is still America. Deal with it.

That they aren't tearing businesses apart and exposing themselves to the brutality of maintaining order is a gift to these wealthier communities, and wise strategy (more on that later). But what can now be done? Unemployment is 13.3% this month, as just reported, and we know the numbers have been played with for appearances' sake. Much of that lands in service occupations and small businesses, comprised mostly of people of color. Some of them, some who would be able to meet their rent, will now be evicted. Where will they go? What will they do?

This puts tremendous pressure on--well, somebody in government. How many people will be sleeping on park benches now? Is this what Ayn Rand meant? Is the world meant to be this cruel? Are they supposed to be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps now? But in a slow-recovering economy, where are the jobs? And what about college graduates?

But it is good to know the world to which they return when the demonstrating's over. It is good to know why cops get cynical and racist, though they would individually tell you they don't like it. They, too, live on the edge; violence engendered by domestic abuse is never far away.

These are just a few of the problems poverty can cause. It can cause eviction, and it can be the other way around. Records are checked, and evicted people find it difficult to get decent-paying jobs. Desmond is mindful of chronicling the psychological damage all this causes.

What's to be done? Desmond suggests two things, working in tandem: First, housing vouchers to give renters a genuine choice; and rent control, to put a cap on exploitation by landlords. Working together, this should alleviated some of the anxiety about finding rental units. One example cited by Desmond found that, not inexplicably due to background, but a prospective renter had to call ninety landlords before finding a place--then was evicted because her son got the police to the residence because he had assaulted his teacher.

If you need to save yourself some time, pick up this book and just start at the Epilogue. The narrative is compelling enough--I could read only about twenty pages at at time, it's so depressing--but Demond's analysis is cogent, based on tremendous research, and hard-hitting.

I'll let two paragraphs, both written toward the end, be the final commentary. First:

Imagine if we didn't provide unemployment insurance or Social Security to most families who needed these benefits. Imagine if the vast majority of families who applied for food stamps were turned away hungry. And yet this is exactly how we treat most poor families seeking shelter.

And then, at the end of the Epilogue, which, now, is really why the marchers are now marching:

Whatever our way out of this mess, one thing is certain. This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering--by no American value is this situation justified. No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark