Evicted tells the story of eight poorer families who are struggling to pay rent during the 2008 financial crisis (which over 3 million people lose their homes and many lose their retirement savings). It deals with how people survive in the face of extreme poverty, very few opportunities, and in some cases, vicious economic exploitation. In the book, Desmond examines how people across the United States manage to (barely) survive while having only a few dollars per day left to do things like feed their children after paying most of their income towards rent.
In their review for sociologist Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (released in 2016), The New York Times called his book "astonishing." The Guardian also called the book "brilliant" and wrote: "What if the dominant discourse on poverty is just wrong? What if the problem is that poverty is profitable? These are [some of] the questions at the heart of Evicted, Matthew Desmond’s extraordinary ethnographic study of tenants in low-income housing in the de-industrialized middle-sized city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin."
In 2017, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. According to the Pulitzer committee, the book won the prize "For [its] deeply researched exposé that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty." It also won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award. While Desmond's book is certainly very well-done, it wasn't that widely-read and didn't receive as much attention as many would argue that it needed - and deserved.
