Evicted
by Matthew Desmond, Enrique Maldonado Roldn · first published 2016
88% recommend13% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Ethnographic account of poor tenants and landlords in Milwaukee, built on years living with its subjects. Gives stories plus data on how housing, poverty and racism interact; suits readers wanting empathy and insight.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a 2016 non-fiction book by American author Matthew Desmond. Set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the book follows eight families struggling to pay rent to their landlords during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Desmond's goal in the book is to highlight the issues of extreme poverty, affordable housing, and economic exploitation in the United States. Evicted was well-received and won multiple book awards such as the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Robert F. Kennedy
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…(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4806.Longitude) * Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26156469-never-split-the...) * Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25852784-evicted) * Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11084145-steve-jobs)…
on “Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?” ↗Evictions destabilize neighborhoods and ruin lives. Evicted by Matthew Desmond is a great book on this issue. It is infuriating some of the predatory, senseless, ruthless, scumbag business practices that slum lords use and crazy to discover that this is a recent…
on “NYC housing court, created to protect tenants, has become a tool for landlords” ↗…keep the poverty stricken alive. Etc. But poverty remains the same. It's there. Alive and well. The level of denial about poverty in the USA is very disheartening. As a side note. I found the book "Evicted" by Matt Desmond to be extremely insightful. The Poverty Industrial Complex is a powerful force. http://www.evictedbook.com/
on “Poverty in America: Greater Than Statistics Indicate” ↗Didn't care for Sapiens. Very pop-science with the author's opinion littered throughout alongside wild predictions on AI, automation. The only other book I read this year was Evicted by Matthew Desmond. It was an excellent account of poverty cycles as it relates to housing.
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?” ↗…the subjects for several years & does a superlative job of telling their story in that sort of explanatory way (not judgmental or absolving) that HN readers seem to appreciate. https://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American-City/... (excerpt of the book here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out)
on “A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews” ↗…refugee. The author’s family fled Vietnam in 1978. After giving birth to her own child, she decides to learn more about her parents’ experiences growing up in a country torn apart by foreign occupiers. >Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. If you want a good understanding of how the issues that cause poverty are intertwined, you should read this book about the eviction crisis…
on “Books I read this year” ↗…gender. I learned a lot and probably will always be learning from that experience. Every time I've challenged my views, I've been rewarded. Two books I've enjoyed or am enjoying that are about chaos: Evicted by Mathew Desmond covers American poverty from a housing perspective. The Big Short covers the 2008 financial crisis and it's much more informative than the film.
On the same note I’d recommend Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. Written in research driven prose, it details the relationships between a handfull of landlords and tenants in some of the poorest neighborhoods…
on “Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?” ↗Do you know of the book "Evicted" by Matthew Desmond? It was for me both enlightening (in what it revealed) and depressing (in what it revealed). Yeah, some people make bad decisions. We. All. Do. The difference is, some are more unlucky…
on “Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their Poverty” ↗…availability (http://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/supply...). Without doing something about NIMBYs and local zoning processes, Section 8 vouchers will not be effective. Matthew Desmond's book Evicted is pretty good on this point (http://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American-City/d...). I've written or worked on Section 8 proposals, as well HUD 811, 202, HOPE VI, and related programs (see…
on “New data challenges the cultural consensus on public housing” ↗I just read the book Evicted by Matthew Desmond which goes into great detail about how much money there is to be made from this approach. It's definitely sympathetic to the plight of the very low income tenants but not unjustly…
on “Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments” ↗Everybody here should read the book that this article is reviewing: Evicted by Matthew Desmond. It's an incredible accomplishment in sociology and one of the most insightful works on poverty I have ever encountered.
on ““Evicted”, an ethnographic study of tenants in low-income housing (2016)” ↗Just finished "Evicted" by Matthew Desmond. Great book on how evictions can keep people in a spiral of poverty.
on “Ask HN: Which book(s) did you read this summer?” ↗…was chance to unite a rural and an urban problem across race and I thought it was a missed opportunity. I still enjoyed the book, but think it is even more powerful when read in tandem with a book like Evicted [1] that views the problem from another perspective. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American-City/...
on “Hillbillies Need No Elegy” ↗In the book "Evicted" by Matthew Desmond he discusses how high turnover in residents negatively affects a neighborhood's sense of community. The book is insightful. Depressing but still insightful. https://www.evictedbook.com/…
on “Airbnb raises violent crime rates in cities as residents are pushed out” ↗