Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

A genuine masterpiece of ethnographic non-fiction. Full of devastating details of the injustices of the American housing market and full of heart in telling stories of the real people whose lives are derailed (sometimes permanently) by eviction.

Some of the more shocking things I learned included:
• 1 in 5 renting families pay more than half their income in rent
• 90% of landlords have lawyers in eviction court, though 90% of tenants do not
• It was (at least when the book was published) the policy of the Milwaukee PD to insist that landlords “abate nuisances” caused by 9-1-1 calls about domestic violence (and other crimes) by evicting their tenants. The predictable result is that women under-report abuse because those that do report get evicted, making them even more dependent on violent men as their housing situation becomes desperate.