Corporette Book Club – Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

11 Comments

1. This was an incredible read that opened my overly-privileged eyes. I absolutely needed to read this. Thank you for selecting it.

2. It looks like no one else has commented yet, so I’ll start us off with two observations from the book that really stuck out to me:

   1) The idea that you could be evicted for calling the police, meaning that women must choose between keeping a home or being safe from DV really shocked me. And that the police basically encouraged those evictions.

   2) When the author talked about his experience and how people would both not totally trust him, but also look out for him, I was surprised. I would not have expected that people with such limited financial resources would have anything left to share, but they did. It made me think about human compassion. I couldn’t imagine any of the landlords in the book doing so.

   1. Herman, I agree with you about the nuisance calling policies being shocking. It was one of several policies that Desmond went through in the book that was just completely irrational to me. I wish it didn’t seem so hard to undo irrational policy.

      I was so struck by the reverberations of eviction–how housing insecurity leads to more joblessness, lowered physical and mental health, lack of community cohesion. All of the pieces make sense when you think about it, but the author did such a good job connecting the dots so that you couldn’t ignore the cumulative damage we do with our acceptance of this system.

   2. I was shocked to read this too. I work with DV survivors and this is absolutely not the policy in my city — I had never heard of it. It would be absolutely devastating to the population I work with.

   3. I was very upset to read in my local paper today that a local hotel has been designated as a “nuisance” by the police after a few people were arrested there. Only 1 person had drugs, and the rest were arrested for outstanding warrants/probation violations, and I don’t see any reason the hotel should be held responsible when most of them weren’t even arrested for anything they were doing at the time. So either they have to file a surveillance plan that the police approve of, or face fines that will probably put them out of business.

      I know the proprietors casually, and of course they happen to be some of the few POC in town. They were literally the only local hotel willing to house the homeless to protect them from COVID-19, and even before that they actively hired people who needed to get back on their feet. There are many much worse dives in town, where no one seems to care what goes on. But the folks who are taking risks for all the right reasons are being punished :(.

   4. I felt the same way. Unbelievable that calling the police is grounds for eviction.
      I was also shocked at how much money could be made on inner-city slum rentals. It’s absolutely astounding. Due to personal experience working for HUD (I was an intern in law school), sadly, I would not promote expansion of the Section 8 housing program. It’s a horribly inefficient and ineffective agency. Rather, I agree with the author’s conclusion that making legal representation mandatory for defendants in an eviction case as a good way to reduce the number of evictions that occur every year. I believe housing is (should be) a basic human right. Evictions should be reserved for clear cases where the tenant is at fault, and the landlord can prove it.
      Thank you to those who recommended this book, it was a great read and I would not have read it otherwise.

3. Is there a place to find details about upcoming books / dates? I’d like to participate but missed this one!

   1. It started in daily comments. The next book will be announced soon, and I will try to do better posting the info repeatedly on different threads.

4. Sadly this is a timely read because evictions are about to skyrocket, crushing families already at the edge.
   https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/06/eviction-moratoriums-starwood/

5. Sadly, I found I couldn’t finish this book. It all sounded too familiar to me from my childhood in a low-income, renting, family. I grew up in a resort town, about as different from inner-city as possible, but we still had to move more than once a year (on average), often from one below-code house to another. Mostly they were pretty okay, but a couple didn’t have potable drinking water and at leaat one didn’t have a toilet. We called them, “funky” with “unique charm” and my mom cleaned the heck out of them.

   The worst part was that we would invest massive amounts of time, energy, and sometimes money making them livable, cleaning out hoarder-level messes, making structural repairs, always repainting and often re-flooring. And then the landlord would raise the rent anywhere from 2x to 10x because of our improvements. It all made me really hate landlords.

6. YES!! Such an incredible book. But, acknowledging that Evicted is really long, there are a ton of speeches on YouTube where the author explains the gist of his research and shares key stories. If you watched two of his presentations, you’d get 80% of the book. Especially for those of us in law or financial services, you’ll better understand how with small administrative rules, the system is crushing black women. He has a quote that black men get locked up while black women get locked out.

   And on the topic of crime-free and nuisance laws, these sound reasonable at the city council meeting, but seem to only be applied to black and brown women. I wonder if a state’s anti-discrimination laws would roll these back. Maybe the little ERA in a state’s constitution?

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