Evicted is one strange book. The writer claims to be a sociologist who spent months with people suffering the effects of evictions and wrote an account that sounds fictionalized but he claims is literally true. I find it impossible to believe his claim, though. The characters he describes illustrate so neatly every single stereotype about people on welfare that it’s suspicious. They are:
1. A homeless woman on welfare who buys $200 face creams and eats lobster and steak on her food stamps. At least, she doesn’t arrive in a Royce to pick up her lobster, so thank God for that very small mercy.
2. A white ex-felon who makes his black stepdaughters chant “White power!”
3. A black woman who keeps having insane numbers of fatherless children, abandoning them, having more, etc. Of course, the children grow up to become crack dealers.
4. A family of black women who celebrate a bizillionth teenage pregnancy and try to chase away a responsible, hard-working father because they don’t want to lose the pregnant kid’s welfare check.
5. Irresponsible black parents who let their baby burn to death while they party.
6. A white male nurse who pisses away a great job and a high salary on an opioid addiction.
All of these characters live in extreme filth, pour kitchen grease down bathtubs, leave rotting food on takeout plates lying around, and pummel at each other at every opportunity.
All white characters hate black people. All black people hate black people, too. I wonder to what extent the anti-black statements by black people were made because that’s what they thought the white Harvard prof wanted to hear but Desmond apparently doesn’t understand that utterances might be influenced by the audience.
Desmond doesn’t judge his characters. To the contrary, he tries to explain how their behavior isn’t a cause but is caused by their poverty. But I can’t get over how conveniently his characters illustrate every stereotype that he sets out to debunk. The result is poverty porn with very little value aside from confirming stereotypes.
The book’s structure is weird, too. There are copious endnotes many of which contain extremely important and relevant information on poverty and homelessness. But it’s beyond annoying to have to dig through the book to find them. The useful endnotes are hidden among truly crazy ones. For instance, one of the stories of today’s homelessness in Milwaukee links to an article about hospital patients in Argentina with no explanation what Argentina has to do with any of it. Another endnote references an article from 1961, again with no explanation how it might be relevant.
The author also loves to fill his endnotes with pompous declarations of the painfully obvious in the spirit of “Hunger can be very unpleasant for human beings. It can cause short and long-term negative effects.”
The conclusion to the book is that Azerbaijan and Zambia are more progressive than the US and have better social services. Those lucky Zambians! I wonder why they offer no foreign aid to the pathetic, miserable Americans.
Let me end the review with the book’s closing words:
No moral code or ethical principle , no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.
Clarissa's Blog 
I haven’t been to Zambia. But, I do work with one. From conversations and information on the net it looks like Zambia has a standard of living comparable to Ghana. So it isn’t horrible. More germane to this topic it is also like Ghana in that the basic social safety net is the extended family and you don’t see things like homelessness very often despite the lack of US levels of prosperity for much of the population.
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It’s not like one sees much homelessness over here either.
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I used to see a lot in the US in places like Sacramento, the greater Washington DC Area, San Francisco, and L.A.
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The people this fellow wrote about are not in the streets. They live in trailer parks and nasty rental places.
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There is a lot of homelessness in America. How prevalent and visible it is in a given city depends on many factors, including the amount of welfare benefits availble and how tolerant local law enforcement is of homeless behavior in public. (San Fancisco is an example of both high benefits and great tolerance of abberant public behavior.)
Many — not all — homeless people are severely mentally ill. In past decades (until about 40 years ago), many of today’s homeless populaation were involentarily confined to state mental institutions. I remember when states with large hospitalized populations like New York and California made a big show of discharging the bulk of such patients onto the streets. The idea was that the states would replace the hospitals with outpatient mental health clinics, and that the severely mentally ill patients would voluntarily take advantage of the free mental health services — an absolutely ridiculous idea.
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It’s all true but the book isn’t about that at all. It’s about homelessness in the sense of people being at risk of getting evicted at any moment.
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I just finished reading this book, and was pleased to find your review. So much praise has been heaped on this book, but I think “strange” is probably the most accurate assessment I have seen.
The telltale paragraph (at bottom of p181 in my copy) for me begins: “When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice full of ‘all sorts of shipwrecked humanity,’ they lost confidence in its political capacity.”
If the author understands this, why would he spend 95% of the book reinforcing those same fictions???
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That’s exactly it. He seems to be genuinely compassionate and trying to help but how come he just happened to choose this particular cast of characters from the 180 people he says he talked to?
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