by Matthew Desmond
Reader 1:
The book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” by Matthew Desmond, is part of the recommended reading list for the high school elective class Human Experience & Cultural Perspectives. This review was written by a resident of the Mariemont schools community with decades of rental experience as a landlord. This was a well written, even engaging, book. However, it portrayed both landlords and tenants as victims of the capitalist system. The author declared that housing is a right. Mr. Desmond then proposed universal housing vouchers for everyone under a certain income. He proposed that if asked to accept a voucher a landlord could not refuse; hence no tenant screening. He also proposed rent controls.
The tenants selected for study in the book were at the low end of the socio-economic scale. The author fairly covered their poor decisions and correctly dealt with the lack of planning and drug abuse of this demographic. The landlords were middle class. They were accurately portrayed as middle-income individual rental landlords trying to make an income after expenses. They were engaged with their tenants and, at times, helped them out. Throughout the book, the author subtlety condemned the capitalist system His solution is government control of rent and the landlords. However, this system has failed miserably whenever it has been tried.
I believe education is only intellectually honest if both sides of an issue are presented. This author endorses a socialist approach to the rental system. I ask that the reading list have balance. I am concerned that behavior-changing teaching techniques, together with the exclusively left-leaning ideology borders on indoctrination, if not indoctrination itself.
In Conclusion:
There are many articles from well known organizations that write about the negative aspects of rent control and government intervention in the rental market. High school students should read about both sides of the story to instill critical thinking. Here are a couple well-written articles to balance Mr. Desmond’s book:
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/issues-2020-rent-control-does-not-make-housing-more-affordable
Reader 2:
The author interviewed and at times lived among eight poor families in Milwaukee, Wis. during 2008-9 (the recession) who faced eviction from their rental properties. As I was reading it, I tried to think how this would be understood by a high school senior although that’s a big stretch for me.
His basic premise as stated in his Prologue, is that the lack of adequate, affordable housing for the poor CREATES their poverty. He states that other researchers have looked at poverty from the perspective of jobs, welfare benefits, single parenthood, incarceration, gangs, social workers and pastors, but none of these factors are universal. The only universal is that all the poor have a landlord. He argues that everyone agrees that a family should pay no more than 30% off their income on housing. His eventual conclusion, as you might expect, is that housing is a basic American need/right that government should underwrite to ensure that no one spends more than 30% of their income on housing. With a stable residence in place, according to his magical thinking, people will have psychological stability, positive social and family relationships, leading to community stability—all of which is lacking in the families he studied.
At the very end of the book he acknowledges that his parents lost his childhood home to foreclosure and this deeply embarrassed and affected him, and caused him to want to do research in housing for the poor.
According to his statistics, 1 in 8 rentals in Milwaukee are subject to eviction each year. Of course that means that 7 out of 8 were not evicted and presumably had some stability in their housing. The poor families he interviewed paid between 50% to 70% off their income on rent. The families he interviewed seemed refreshingly honest about their situations. Over the 2 year period he followed them, most were evicted for nonpayment of rent, some for the criminal acts of their kids which affected their neighbors, one for letting his pit bull get out and invade a neighbors place, several for occupying an uninhabitable place, stealing utilities, etc. Interestingly, nobody seemed to complain to him that the evictions were unfair (one walked away from a nice place that had subsidized rent and spent years regretting her decision which she couldn’t explain). On the whole their landlords were painted in somewhat sympathetic terms, often delaying eviction, lending them money, buying them food. The families however seemed to have non-stop chaos in their lives, moving from place to place, family dysfunction, children in foster care, severe drug dependence, very few employed, fathers mostly non-existent, very little in the way of extended family or church connections. It’s heartbreaking to read their stories. But the author ignores the family chaos in reaching his conclusion that socialism via housing vouchers is needed to solve the deep-seated problems of these families.
I don’t know if a senior would see it this way, though.
I think this also fits very well into Critical Race theory. The landlords are not unreasonable, the poor tenants are resigned to their evictions, it’s not really personal, it’s just that the SYSTEM is bad, unfair, and discriminatory and therefore needs to be eliminated. Capitalism is bad; socialist remedies are the answer. The author believes the government policy of “equal treatment” of tenants is wrong because society is unequal—Black men being disproportionally incarcerated and Black women being disproportionally evicted. Consequently, government housing authorities using uniformly equal standards, like eliminating tenants with prior evictions or incarceration, is inherently racist and inequitable. He wants us to move to an equity system in housing rental (treating people as representative of their racial group and demanding equal outcomes for blacks and for whites, for example) rather than a system which treats individuals equally under the law regardless of their race.