‘There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this wealthy land,’ argues American sociologist Desmond in this brilliant book about housing and the lives of eight families in MilwaukeeWhat whether the dominant discourse on poverty is just erroneous? What whether the problem isn’t that destitute people have detestable morals – that they’re sluggish and impulsive and irresponsible and have no family values – or that they lack the skills and smarts to fit in with our shiny 21st-century economy? What whether the problem is that poverty is profitable? These are the questions at the heart of Evicted, Matthew Desmond’s extraordinary ethnographic study of tenants in low-income housing in the deindustrialised middle-sized city of Milwaukee, or Wisconsin.
You might not think that there is a lot of money to be extracted from a dilapidated trailer park or a black neighbourhood of “sagging duplexes,fading murals, 24-hour daycares”. But you would be erroneous. Tobin Charney makes $400000 a year out of his 131 trailers, and some of which are little better than hovels. Sherrena Tarver,a former schoolteacher who is one of the only black female landlords in the city, makes enough in rents on her many properties – some presentable, and others squalid – to holiday in Jamaica and attend conferences on real estate.
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Source: theguardian.com