Īrleen Belle, a member of one of the eight families Desmond documents, is a Black single mother struggling to secure housing with her low income.

The families are diverse in race, age, and gender, yet all struggle with rent payments, which consume the majority of their already meager income.

Set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Matthew Desmond tells the story of eight families and their experiences with eviction and poverty. According to Desmond, “eviction as a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.” He picked the setting of Milwaukee, believing that it captures a broad national experience from an under-represented urban city. In an interview with The Atlantic, author Matthew Desmond expresses his goal of writing about poverty through the lens of eviction, focusing on relationships and interactions among landlords, tenants, and judges. The Pulitzer committee selected the book 'for a deeply researched exposé that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty.' Background Įvicted was well-received and won multiple book awards such as the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Robert F. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Desmond's goal in the book is to highlight the issues of extreme poverty, affordable housing, and economic exploitation in the United States.

Set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the book follows eight families struggling to pay rent to their landlords during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a 2016 non-fiction book by American author Matthew Desmond.

Poverty and profit in the american city