Summary Of The Book 'Evicted' By Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond writes the book Evicted, about eight families and the ecosystem that is the housing market of the poor. It follows the vicious course of paying rent in run down homes or not paying rent and trying to get out to have a better life, if not for them their children.They are not powerless but the systems in place for people in those conditions can only benefit so much and often times keeps them cornered and they become desperate to get out. Desmond tells us of certain regulations that intend to aid these families but instead makes things worse and those families become trapped in the poor cycle. Families involved in domestic abuse have the heart breaking decision to either call the police about the situation or continue living in

Unfortunately this is a common situation many women in the book are faced with. They need a roof over their heads to at least have a chance of getting out of the below standard life they are in. People become desperate in this situation that they will take the abuse if they can keep paying rent in the home they have just moved into. Many domestic abuse situations were seen more as a nuisance rather than a serious issue that needed to be faced, “A woman reporting domestic violence was far more likely to land her landlord a nuisance citation if she lived in the inner city.In the vast majority of cases (83 percent), landlords who received a nuisance citation for domestic violence responded by either evicting the tenants or by threatening to evict them for future

Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart”(300) There are homeless shelters in place in communities with high poverty rate with the sole purpose of providing shelter so individuals and families have a place to stay and go out and try and get a job. While these families are not homeless they are always constantly being evicted and moving out. Moving trailer park to trailer park is not a stable home, it might as well be a homeless shelter. They have no way to get their feet on the ground and get a leg up on their lives. Transferring from one slum to the next can be extremely taxing especially for the younger children as well. Always having to move to a new neighborhood or school area starts the kids at a disadvantage already. Even when they found a place to live for a while they were well below living conditions, ““People who were repulsed by their home, who felt they had no control over it, and yet had to give most of their income to it—they thought less of themselves(Desmond 257). Any repairs or improvements of any sort were left responsible to the landlords. Thing is they had no motivation to improve any of their buildings as they knew their tenants would eventually fall behind on rent and would have to evict