As an introduction to this course, we were instructed to read Evicted by Matthew Desmond. I have found that I truly enjoyed reading this book; it is a great balance between hard facts and personal narratives. The author focuses on the stories of landlords and tenants in the poorest parts of the city of Milwaukee.
The book reads like a novel, easily drawing me into the stories of the people, becoming invested in their journeys. The statistics and references that the author periodically adds to the text does not distract me, but rather improves my understanding of the larger context of renting policies and their effects on people.
One policy that I found to be striking was the
nuisance property ordinance. The policy’s aim was to discourage tenants to
place unnecessary calls to the police and distract resources from the department
for minor things. However, such a policy has had negative consequences. When
tenants of a property call the police an excessive amount of times, the
landlord gets fined. As a result, when tenants place too many calls, the
landlord usually retaliates in eviction so they will not get fined. This
discourages tenants from placing calls to the police, even when they face real
danger such as domestic abuse. I was completely unaware of this ordinance and
am horrified that is policy has such terrible consequences. In the end, the
tenants are the ones suffering while the landlords have all the power. Desmond
best summarizes the tenants’ mindset on such an issue: “keep quiet and face
abuse or call the police and face eviction” (192). Another situation that
further proved that the system of renting is broken was the story of the fire
at Eighteenth and Wright. The house caught fire due to a broken lamp and
quickly spread to the rest of the house. There were a couple families in the
house at the time and one child did not make it. It was an awful situation that
could have been avoided if the house had fire alarms. But the landlord either
did not have them installed correctly or at all, so the tenants had no advantage
to leaving the house before the fire got out of control. In the end, the
landlord was not blamed, she still got to keep that month’s rent, and she made
lots of money from the insurance. The family who lived there lost a child and
lost their home. It is starkly evident that the system can working against tenants
in some situations. It gave me the sense of hopelessness; families are
constantly having to suffer while landlords make a living off of that
suffering.