But comfortable living standards necessitate that rent shouldn’t make up more than 30% of your total income. For one in four of these, that number is 70% or more. Research by Harvard University confirms this.Īccording to the census, most of those with lower income have to pay 50% of their earnings on rent. One of the biggest causes is that rent is going up while incomes are falling. In one case, people protested when a landlord tried to eject three families in the Bronx! Even in the Great Depression communities resisted enough that removal of tenants was rare. If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.ĭownload PDF Lesson 1: Unemployment, low salaries, and high rent make it difficult for some tenants to avoid getting evicted.Įvictions are common in the US these days, but it wasn’t always this way.

Let’s jump right into these lessons and learn more! Housing is a civil right and we might be able to give it to everybody by implementing a housing voucher system.

The stresses and challenges that families who get evicted have to go through are unbearable.

Eviction rates have been rising because of high rent, low salaries, and unemployment.

Here are just 3 of the many eye-opening lessons I discovered in this book: It’s currently the number one bestseller on Amazon in the Poverty category and will reveal a whole lot about this topic that you never even imagined could happen. If you’re looking to learn more about these issues, then look no further than Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. But is it always justified? And how bad is this problem really? You might not worry about being evicted, but for many Americans, this fear is real and too common. It’s certainly fair for people that don’t pay for their space to be thrown out. Why would someone do such a thing? In this case, the tenants got angry simply because the landlord told them they had to pay rent or get out. There were broken windows, cupboards, and appliances. It was a landlord walking through a house they owned which the previous tenants trashed. The other day I was browsing through Reddit when I came across a crazy video that made me stop and watch it all the way through. Listen to the audio of this summary with a free reading.fm account*:

Evicted by matthew desmond sparknotes