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A review by fogthroughthevalley
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Contains both personal stories of eviction and academic analysis of the issue. The anecdotes draw you in and the issue solidifies in a way that might not already be apparent for people who have not experienced poverty and eviction firsthand. I would deem this an essential read for anyone interested in better understanding the inhumane systems currently in place in the United States.
Two quotes/sections of the book that immediately stood out to me:
"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.
Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma, believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addiction, and other harrowing events, were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives.
This lack of faith had less to do with their neighborhood's actual poverty and crime rates than with the level of concentrated suffering they perceived around them.
A community that saw so clearly its own pain, had a difficult time also sensing its potential."
"But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality."
Two quotes/sections of the book that immediately stood out to me:
"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.
Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma, believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addiction, and other harrowing events, were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives.
This lack of faith had less to do with their neighborhood's actual poverty and crime rates than with the level of concentrated suffering they perceived around them.
A community that saw so clearly its own pain, had a difficult time also sensing its potential."
"But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality."
Content Warnings
Moderate: Addiction, Drug abuse, Drug use, Gun violence, Pregnancy, and Fire/Fire injury