VCU news

By Dina Weinstein

Matthew Desmond, Ph.D., author of “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” Virginia Commonwealth University’s 2019 Common Book, told an audience at the Stuart C. Siegel Center on Wednesday that bold political leadership on housing is needed to help the 2.3 million American families facing eviction.

“For about 100 years in America we have had this idea, this consensus, that we should spend 30 percent of our income on housing costs. That gives us enough money to save, afford food, afford transportation. For a long part of our history we have achieved that goal, but times have changed,” Desmond said. “Today, the majority of poor American families are paying 50 percent of their income on housing costs. And about one-fourth of those families are spending 70 percent of their income just on rent and utilities.”

In his talk, Desmond set up the scenarios of families he followed throughout the book, while recounting his experiences embedded in their lives. Desmond lived in a trailer park and a rooming house to shine a light on the depth and breadth of the housing problem nationwide. Only 1 in 4 Americans who qualify for housing assistance receives it, Desmond said.

“Families that are crushed by the high cost of housing [if they had that help, then they] could afford job training, community college, VCU tuition,” Desmond said. “Many can’t hold a job down long enough. They can’t hold their house down long enough. Think about the brainpower, all the potential that we just squandered, wasted, when people … wonder how they are going to make rent from one month to the next.”

In “Eviction,” which takes place in Milwaukee, Desmond follows Arleen and seven other families as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads with issues coming up that put them in precarious housing, financial and employment situations along the way, often snowballing one after another. The book won numerous awards, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Desmond is a Princeton University sociologist and founder of the Eviction Lab, which built the first nationwide database of evictions.

The book was selected for VCU’s Common Book Program, which selects a book each year that touches on societal issues that have no easy answers to encourage students to move beyond singular solutions to complex problems. Copies of the book were distributed to all first-year students.

Desmond’s talk — sponsored by University College and the Office of the Provost — capped a year of events at VCU and in the Richmond community organized by the Common Book Program.

“We’re talking about evictions in our classrooms here at VCU,” said Kathryn Howell, Ph.D., co-director of the RVA Eviction Lab in the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, as she introduced Desmond. “We’re discussing it with advocates, policymakers and residents. Eviction and its roots in income inequality, affordable housing shortages, historic discrimination and the lack of means for those most marginalized is now an ongoing part of local, state and national conversation. The work of tonight’s speaker and his Eviction Lab has changed the conversation and brought eviction out of the shadows.”

In his lecture, Desmond showed the results of his initial research questions: Who gets evicted and what are the consequences of losing one’s home?

“I went everywhere with these families,” Desmond said. “I followed them in shelters and in their homes. I watched their kids. I went to church with them. I went to funerals. I was there for a birth. Some are white, some are black, some have kids.”

In his presentation, Desmond personalized the story of Arleen and her sons. They were evicted when a man kicked down their door after one son threw a snowball at the man’s car and another time, at a different apartment, when the police came after a son kicked a teacher and ran home.

The cause, Desmond said, has to do with the fact that incomes for many Americans have plunged or stayed stagnant, especially for people with only a high school education. And housing costs have soared. The cost of utilities have gone up too. Desmond looked at thousands of courtroom records in Milwaukee and across the country. What he found crunching the numbers was that 40 people a day were evicted in Milwaukee.

“That’s 1 in 14 evicted in the inner city alone,” Desmond said. “That is a huge amount of displacement.”

But he had no way to understand whether that was a high or low number, whether it was an unusual case.

“For a long time, we had no way to answer that. The U.S. government does not collect data on evictions.”

Desmond said evictions are so harmful that they are as important to track as the number of school dropouts or car wrecks. So for the past seven years, Desmond has been working with a team at Princeton on building the first national eviction database. They have collected 80 million eviction records and put them all online.

“It’s literally taking an invisible problem and trying to put it on the map,” he said.

Desmond said the number of evictions nationally are higher than the number of foreclosures at the height of the foreclosure crisis, and double the number of people arrested for drugs. It is bigger than the opioid crisis. It affects women and children in great numbers.

For about 100 years in America we have had this idea, this consensus, that we should spend 30 percent of our income on housing costs. That gives us enough money to save, afford food, afford transportation. For a long part of our history we have achieved that goal, but times have changed. Today, the majority of poor American families are paying 50 percent of their income on housing costs. And about one-fourth of those families are spending 70 percent of their income just on rent and utilities.

In choosing his research, Desmond explained that he wanted to look deeper into the problem and beyond typical arguments that poor people have made wrong decisions or the system fails them.

“I wanted to tell a story about folks who are poor and not poor and are tethered together and try to understand how a gain for one could be a loss for another,” Desmond said. ”And I thought eviction does that. When we told the story of poverty, we had to tell the story of a lot more of us.”

Desmond found that landlords in some of the poorest areas were making six-figure incomes off their renters. He stressed that another factor that plays into the cycle of poverty and evictions is the legacy of racism in the United States. 

Desmond lauded Richmond’s efforts to stem its high eviction rates, which were made public in 2018. Desmond’s datasets showed neighborhoods with 11 percent eviction rates, which is five times the national average, making Richmond the U.S. city with the second-highest eviction rates.

He keeps a positive outlook on the possibility of diminishing evictions and prioritizing stable housing for all. He looks to other sweeping public health campaigns eradicating diseases and slum housing.

“We have the money. It’s well within our capacity,” Desmond said. “We just make decisions on how to spend it. Homeowner Tax Subsidies … far, far, far outpace direct housing assistance to the needy. We already have a universal housing program in America, it’s an entitlement, it’s just not for poor people.” 

Desmond pointed out that $170 billion in federal homeowner subsidies go to families with six-figure incomes versus $40 billion of direct housing assistance for the poor. He also said the housing voucher program works and should be expanded to everyone who qualifies. 

Desmond urged students to make an impact by connecting to organizations and people working on housing, poverty and eviction issues.