Analysis Of Evicted By Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond’s Evicted takes a sociological approach to understanding the low-income housing system by following eight families as they struggle for residential stability. The novel also features two landlords of the families, giving the audience both sides and allowing them to make their own conclusions. Desmond goes to great lengths to make the story accessible to all classes and races, but it seems to especially resonate with people who can relate to the book’s subjects or who are liberals in sound socioeconomic standing. With this novel, Desmond hopes to highlight the fundamental structural and cultural problems in the evictions of poor families, while putting faces to the housing crisis. Through the lens of the social reproduction theory, Desmond argues in Evicted that evictions are not an effect of poverty, but rather, a cause of it. In more than one storyline of the novel’s featured families, a housing eviction leads to job loss, which Desmond uses as an example of how eviction can produce class inequality. One such character was Ned, a white man who loses his job after missing two workdays to help his family move; Desmond argues that this is not an isolated incident. If given an eviction notice, the renter must dedicate a significant portion of time to resolving their eviction with the court, finding a new place to live, and moving their possessions to the new location. Most cannot find new housing right away, forcing them to move their property into a storage