There's no place like home

[bloodygranuaile]

 Due to being all up in my feelings about our rushed move this summer, I nominated Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City for the politics book group's September read, in no small part to put things in perspective and rebuke myself for being so whiny about this even though it could be much worse. My friends indulged me, I read the book, and friends, I have been solidly perspective-d, because it could indeed be much, much worse. 

 

Evicted takes place in Milwaukee and follows eight families. These include two landlords, one a white landlord for a trailer park full of white tenants, and the other a black landlord for a host of inner-city properties rented mostly to black tenants. The other six families are tenants of the landlords--at least for a while. The author bolsters the stories of these families with reams of supporting data, illustrating the assorted links and feedback loops between eviction, poverty, racism, mental health, unemployment, neighborhood cohesion, domestic violence, and a host of other issues. Shaping all of this is our nation's utterly dysfunctional housing policy, which seem designed to enhance rather than check the raw brutality of extractive capitalism. 

 

Some of the characters followed in this book are more sympathetic than others. By this I mean Ned is an inexcusable racist and needs to stop being an asshole to his mixed stepdaughers, I don't care what other issues he's got. Ahem. Other than that, Desmond does a good job of illustrating that substandard housing, grinding poverty, and untreated trauma issues can lead to all sorts of things that we would generally file under "poor decision-making"--losing your cool at people, doing very hard drugs, leaving the stove on overnight, spending money as soon as it gets to you instead of putting it in a bank account. One extremely pointed anecdote was when Larraine, a trailer park resident who everyone in her life considers chronically bad with money (because she is), spends her whole month's worth of food stamps on one meal that includes lobster tails. She knows what she's doing, and she is willing to live entirely off of ramen from the food pantry for the rest of the month, because it is worth it to her to have had that one really luxurious meal. It's not because she secretly isn't poor, or because she's too dumb to realize that she'll be hungry for the rest of the month, or any of the other fictions politicians draw on when spinning horror stories about people spending their food stamps on the "wrong" things. People are big unpredictable poorly maintained bundles of feelings, not perfectly rational economic self-interest maximizing machines, no matter how much you lecture them that they should be or how many economics textbooks are written under the assumption that they are. Real people, fully human people out here in the real world, have dignity and inherent worth and also limited willpower and their own priorities. One thing that can often fix many of the maladaptive behaviors is... putting people in a nice, stable housing situation. 

 

The end of the book has a bunch of policy discussion that I think was edifying but I honestly don't know enough about housing policy to challenge, and a fascinating author's note about his time living among the subjects of the book in Milwaukee and how he went about gathering and corroborating evidence to put the whole project together. Best of all, for me at least, the end of the book also features a set of discussion questions, so I don't have to write them up for the meeting. Yay! Not nearly enough of the books we read for this book club have discussion questions in them already.

 

Anyway, housing should be decommodified and a human right, and I should get off my ass and get more involved with DSA's tenant organizing work. Thank you.