How does the description of the Ewell household help characterize he Ewell family?

The Ewell household is described in terms of poverty, filth, abandonment and chaos,

"Maycomb’s Ewells lived behind the town garbage dump in what was once a Negro cabin....The cabin’s plank walls were supplemented with sheets of corrugated iron, its roof shingled with tin cans hammered flat, so only its general shape suggested its original design: square, with four tiny rooms opening onto a shotgun hall, the cabin rested uneasily upon four irregular lumps of limestone. Its windows were merely open spaces in the walls, which in the summertime were covered with greasy strips of cheesecloth to keep out the varmints that feasted on Maycomb’s refuse." ch 17