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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
Published in March of 2016.
Is higher education an engine for social mobility, or rather a mechanism to maintain class privilege? This is the question that all of us working in higher ed must ask ourselves.
This is the question that I’ve come to believe should also be at the center of the edtech profession. What has been the impact of all money that we spend on technology in higher ed on improving postsecondary productivity? And if investing in tech has improved productivity (an open question), have these improvements resulted in greater postsecondary access, lower costs, and higher quality? Does educational technology contribute to higher ed as engine of social mobility, or rather as yet another factor in our post-digital economy that concentrates advantage on the already privileged? These are the questions that framed my reading of Evicted.
By now, you have no doubt heard about this book. Evicted made almost every list of best books 2016 - including the lists of best books from the NYTimes, the Washington Post, and the CS Monitor.
Evicted would certainly make my list of best books of 2016, as this is one of those rare books that fundamentally shifts how we understand the world. Desmond, a professor of sociology at Harvard and a 2015 MaCarthur genius award recipient, shifts our understanding of the causes of persistent and concentrated poverty by putting housing at the center of the story. Unlike other sociologists who have studied poverty and housing, Desmond does not concentrate on the effects of public housing. Rather, Desmond’s ethnographic research is situated in the private housing market - where over 90 percent of the poor find their homes.
Desmond seeks to describe both the supply side of the inner-city housing market - a market increasingly controlled by a smaller number of landlords owning multiple rental properties - as well as the demand side of the rental equation. What Desmond found was that these poor renters not only pay very high proportions of their incomes for rent (usually more than 70 percent) for apartments that are of substandard quality - these same renters also face a high risk of being evicted. Milwaukee, where Desmond did his ethnographic research for Evicted, sees approximately 16,000 adults and children evicted each year from a base of 105,000 renter households.
As Desmond chronicles, eviction is not only an outcome of poverty - but a cause. Insecurely housed adults have high rates of depression, anxiety, and joblessness. Children from evicted households are at high risk for dropping out of school. Getting evicted also makes it more difficult to find affordable housing, as most landlords will not rent to anyone with a history of eviction. (In Milwaukee, one-in-five black women report being evicted sometime in their adult life). The lack of quality affordable rental housing, and the ability of landlords to screen residents, has the effect of driving up rental costs.
Evicted is a thoroughly researched work of social science that reads like a novel. Desmond spent years living with the poor white and black residents of Milwaukee, and he tells the story of the causes and consequences of eviction through their eyes. Desmond’s combination of qualitative (ethnographic) and quantitative (analyzing eviction records) research methods allows the reader to gain empathy for the families living through insecure housing, as well an understanding of the determinants and scale of eviction epidemic.
Can we find a bridge between our work in higher education and tragedy of insecure, substandard, and unaffordable housing that Desmond chronicles in Evicted?
While reading Evicted I kept thinking about how we might be able to use online learning - and particularly mobile learning - to extend educational opportunities to those living with insecure housing. The people that Desmond follows in Evicted often don’t have a reliable place to stay - but they almost always have access to a mobile phone. Desmond points out that the very poor tend not to use the internet to find housing, but could the web (and particularly the mobile web) be used to provide housing education, job training, and alternative certifications and credentials? Kids living in insecure housing have poor school attendance records, as they often are forced to change schools during a forced move. Could mobile learning provide some degree of educational consistency?
What would happen if our edtech profession spent more of our time reading and talking about the challenges surfaced in books like Evicted?
What books do you plan to read in 2017?
