At the time of the election of Donald Trump in 2016, there was a lot of soul-searching among liberal American journalists over their failure to closely report and reflect the lives of those “left behind” citizens in the “rust-belt” states, the places that gave Trump victory. One book that came out that year, Evicted, by Matthew Desmond, a professor at Princeton, was an unforgettable example of the kind of reporting that had been neglected.
For two years, beginning in 2008, Desmond had lived among the people at the very harshest end of American society. He took up residence first in a trailer park, and then in the poorest quarter of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In befriending families unable to pay their bills, who had desperately moved from one home to another, and also the landlords who profited from them and turned them out on to the street, he presented a series of vivid, heartbreaking portraits of people drowning in a system loaded against the most vulnerable. His conclusion back then was a stark one: not only that the constant threat and reality of eviction was the number one factor in perpetuating destitution, but also that there were many people making a lot of money from keeping other people in that traumatic, impoverished state.
