Summary Of The Book 'Evicted' By Matthew Desmond

In the book Evicted by Matthew Desmond, numerous accounts of tenants being evicted and the consequences of said evictions are depicted for the reader. As is seen throughout the book, the landlords, or the better off, upper class people in the book are the ones who benefit from the eviction process and the eviction itself, not the tenants who represent the lower classes. For the tenants, the eviction process becomes a way to further dig themselves into poverty and inequality and makes it harder for them to have a level playing field when they attempt to have a fresh start. For the landlord, tenants are seen as a dime a dozen, so the landowners are able to dictate how much the tenants owe and how much their manual labor earns them to pay their

Most of these soon-to-be-evicted tenants never bother showing up to the court date for eviction court, but when the tenants do, the verdict never goes their way; as Desmond states in Evicted, the day turns out one of two ways: the landlord and the tenant work out a deal, which typically always includes stipulations, like a “$55 late fee” (Desmond, p. 96) and the landlord demanding for more money, thus dissolving the eviction, or in Arleen’s case, the eviction going through with added on money judgements that “carry consequences for tenants” that can “suddenly reappear in tenants’ lives several years after the eviction” with an “annual rate that would be the envy of any financial portfolio: 12 percent” (Desmond, p.103). The formal eviction process with the added on money judgements that are docketed on to a tenant’s credit perpetuate inequality in that the judgements punish these tenants only when they start to be doing better and begin to have credit. The money judgements come back at the tenant with a vengeance because of the high interest rate of twelve percent, which is a very high annual interest rate, making it hard to pay rent and survive on top of having to pay interest from a time when the tenant was worse off than they are now. Having the money judgement

The book uses specific examples to show that the pricing of the units and lack of resources available to those of the lower class furthers inequality; the pricing and lack of resources results in a staggering amount of evictions that take place because these people are unable to keep up with the price of a place to live when there is no financial help available to them, which is not the case with the upper class, who have approximately the same or slightly higher rent, but way more means to gain money to pay that rent, thus resulting in the upper class tenants having fewer evictions on their record. The book also demonstrates how the formal eviction process makes it impossible for the lower class to create for themselves a fresh start because of the inclusion of docketed judgments that come back to haunt the previously evicted tenants at times when all is going well for them. Through these two aspects of forced evictions and never ending sanctions for obtaining an eviction, inequality is maintained and perpetuated for the lower class