Book Report – Evicted by Matthew Desmond

Ten years ago, Matthew Desmond climbed deep inside grim, impoverished Milwaukee, WI to study its fraught real estate market. The result is the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize winning Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City and it is a monster to get through, not due to its style (entirely gripping) or length (just 341 pages, including the About This Project section which made me weep like a small child). The chore is that it’s flat-out heartbreaking to get to know the featured characters, most of whom simply fall behind or between the cracks in the richest land on Earth. As with Linda Tirado’s Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, this book corners the reader into understanding the mentality of struggling beneath the poverty line. Tirado taught me to stop expecting – Christ, encouraging – counter help to be cheerful and I’m now convinced to stop judging people who play the miserable lottery – yes, even the ones who throw losing tickets around the nice town center where I live, work, and enjoy a brisk walk – because many are desperate for solutions, scratching away for answers. But this is a space for business lessons, not ranting about how right the author is when he notes “financial techniques… designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor” are “fundamentally unfair,” so let’s get on to business as usual, shall we?

The Brittain brothers – Tom, Dave, and Jim – own Eagle Moving, a 60-year old Milwaukee company they took over from the father years ago. Back in Dad’s day, there would be an eviction or two each week, but now the boys are legit specialists, depositing renters’ possessions curbside on the regular while boasting cute slogans like “Service with a Grunt” and “Movers Not Shakers” and 4.3 stars from 30 Google reviews. They don’t even have to collect fees from the newly homeless – mostly single mothers of color – as it’s the landlords who foot these bills, in many cases eager to collect the next round of first/last/security. Sure, it’s no fun to displace a neighbor or fellow God-fearing congregant – or in one mover’s case, his own daughter – but rules are rules and opportunity abounds. At the time of Desmond’s fieldwork and research, Eagle Moving had swelled to a staff of dozens operating a fleet of vans and eighteen-foot trucks out of a 108,000-square-foot facility (lest you forget the valuable recurring revenue stream from storing poor folks’ stuff), with a full 40% of top line sales stemming from evictions. Hey, someone’s gotta do it and the margins are healthy.

As demonstrated by a featured slumlord husband & wife team, the worst properties where tenants often live in unspeakable conditions yield the biggest returns. Who knew? Desmond purports that the ghetto – which has “always been more a product of social design than desire” – started to take root in the fifteenth century. In the era of the iron cannonball, cities needed more than moats and ramparts when under attack and started building high walls with tall buildings behind them. (Think Paris with six-story tenements, Edinburgh’s climbing twice as high.) “While agrarian families were driven form the land to increasingly congested cities,” writes Desmond, “the competition for space drove up land values and rents.” Subsequent landowning generations could not resist profits from these slum accommodations and an industry was shaped, eagerly brought to America and honed over ensuing centuries. The English landed gentry practice of so-called privilege of distress entitled the seizure and sale of tenants’ possessions to recover back rent, “a practice that persisted well into the twentieth century.” When we’re willing to look we know conditions aren’t much better today and the author helpfully loads the Epilogue: Home and Hope with proposed solutions centered on the widely accepted notion that only about 30% of one’s income should be eaten up by housing costs. Yes, it involves vouchers. Yes, those are controversial. Yes, you can afford to help more, as can I, because as a society we’re supposed to be better than this.