‘There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land,’ argues American sociologist Desmond
Evicted by Matthew Desmond – what if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people? ‘There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land,’ argues American sociologist Desmond in this brilliant book about housing and the lives of eight families in Milwaukee W hat if the dominant discourse on poverty is just wrong?What if the problem isn’t that poor people have bad morals – that they’re lazy and impulsive and irresponsible and have no family values – or that they lack the skills and smarts to fit in with our shiny 21st-century economy? What if the problem is that poverty is profitable? These are the questions at the heart of Evicted , Matthew Desmond’s extraordinary ethnographic study of tenants in low-income housing in the deindustrialised middle-sized city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You might not think that there is a lot of money to be extracted from a dilapidated trailer park or a black neighbourhood of “sagging