EVICTED: POVERTY AND PROFIT IN THE AMERICAN CITY

Recently I added to my reading list the excellent book, EVICTED: POVERTY AND PROFIT IN THE AMERICAN CITY by Matthew Desmond. It’s eye-opening for a number of reasons, and I highly recommend it to anyone wishing to understand the devastating effects of the housing crisis, especially on the nation’s poorest.

I found, not surprisingly, many parallels with my own situation. Housing instability is as much a cause of poverty as it is a consequence. Since 2011, I have had to move no fewer than four times, although the second two instances were voluntary: once to escape horrid conditions in the unit, and the latest because the owner is selling the house and I can’t stay. But four moves in seven years…it takes its toll. Rents keep going up, but incomes remain stagnant, putting stable, affordable housing out of reach for more and more people.

Here in the Greater Cleveland area, many landlords refuse to lease units to applicants who aren’t making at least three times the amount of rent—after taxes, utilities, food, and other expenses. Slumlords, such as those described in Desmond’s book, are much more flexible in that particular area, but the trade-off is providing substandard, often dangerously dilapidated housing that ultimately eats up so much of a tenant’s meager income that little or nothing remains for anything else, including food and utilities. This in turn forces people who otherwise wouldn’t need to go on public assistance end up depending on it just to survive—and when those benefits are slashed or eliminated altogether, tenants must then make the painful decision of whether to pay rent or feed their children; go homeless or go without badly needed medicine; freeze and risk frostbite or death inside the unit, or face the same fate out on the streets. When emergencies crop up, as they invariably do, impoverished tenants almost always find themselves falling behind and end up evicted because they cannot pay their rent.

I’ve thought back to the situations I’ve been in, that reflect what Desmond writes about. The last unit I dwelt in was infested with bedbugs and pantry moths, the electricity was substandard, my landlord-roommate kept the heat turned off most of the time, which actually did cause me to get frostbite on the tips of several toes (fortunately, the small black spots scabbed over and healed) and contributed to the pipes bursting on more than one occasion. But when I and other tenants in the building tried to get the homeowner to take action, we were ignored and given unrealistic quick-fixes such as turning on the kitchen stove and leaving it open while the furnace was broken down. Not even my roommate-landlord was keen on that.

If I hadn’t been in school and able to take advantage of student loans, I shudder to think how things might have ended up.

But these same sick scenarios are playing out all across the country, with no end in sight. Housing instability also leads to job instability, with eviction increasing the likelihood of a layoff by upwards of twenty-five percent. Under such circumstances, the loss of both home and job so often leads to the streets and the homeless shelters. Many are never able to recover.

Put someone in affordable, stable, permanent housing, however, and the changes cannot be ignored. People return to school to get degrees with which they can obtain decent-paying work. Depression fades away. Health improves as more income can go toward adequate food and drink. The entire outlook on life goes from pessimism to optimism.

Desmond suggests that a universal voucher system, which would cost a fraction of the federal budget at around twenty billion U.S. dollars annually, could eliminate homelessness by making housing affordable once again. I think that’s only part of the equation of what’s really needed. In addition to a massive green infrastructure providing education and jobs, caps must be placed on rents and utilities to bring the cost of living back down to reasonable levels. A universal voucher system as cure-all for housing instability sounds nice on paper, but without caps limiting how much landlords and utility providers can charge consumers, in tandem with a massive jobs program, it would be dismissed as just another handout and political will would not materialize.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the book. I highly recommend it in order to gain a wider understanding of the crisis.