Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,128

not what is most needed in the deserted metropolises of the Rust Belt or Florida’s impoverished suburbs or small towns dotting the landscape. One city must build; another must destroy. If our cities and towns are rich in diversity—with unique textures and styles, gifts and problems—so too must be our solutions.

Whatever our way out of this mess, one thing is certain. This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering—by no American value is this situation justified. No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

When I was growing up, my father was a preacher, and my industrious mother worked everywhere. Money was always tight. Sometimes the gas got shut off, and Mom cooked dinner on top of our wood-burning stove. She knew how to make do, having grown up across from a junkyard in Columbus, Georgia, and, later, in San Francisco’s infamous Ford Hotel. She had done better for herself and expected us kids to do the same, to go off to college even if she and my father weren’t able to help pay for it. My father drilled this point home in his own way. Whenever we drove past a line of bent-over people, sweating in the sun for some lousy job, my father would turn to us and ask, “Do you want to do that for the rest of your life?”

“No.”

“Then go to college.”

Thanks to some loans and scholarships, I was able to attend Arizona State University, a four-hour drive from my hometown of Winslow. I thought I might want to be a lawyer, so I enrolled in courses on communication, history, and justice. In those classes, I began learning things that did not square with the image of America passed down to me from my parents, Sunday-school teachers, and Boy Scout troop leaders. Was the depth and expanse of poverty in this country truly unmatched in the developed world? Was the American Dream widely attainable or reserved for a privileged few? When I wasn’t working or studying, I was thumbing through books in the library, seeking answers about the character of my country.

It was around that time that the bank took my childhood home. A friend and I made the four-hour drive and helped my parents move. I remember being deeply sad and embarrassed. I didn’t know how to make sense of it, but maybe something worked its way inside because, once back on campus, I found myself spending weekends helping my girlfriend build houses with Habitat for Humanity. Then I began hanging out with homeless people around Tempe’s Mill Avenue several nights a week. The people I met living on the street were young and old, funny, genuine, and troubled. When I graduated, I felt a need to understand poverty in America, which I saw as the wellspring of so many miseries. I figured sociology would be the best place to do that. So I enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a town that grizzled Milwaukeeans refer to as “thirty square miles surrounded by reality.”

When I began studying poverty as a graduate student, I learned that most accounts explained inequality in one of two ways. The first referenced “structural forces” seemingly beyond our control: historical legacies of discrimination, say, or massive transformations of the economy. The second emphasized individual deficiencies, from “cultural” practices, like starting a family outside of wedlock, to “human capital” shortfalls, like low levels of education. Liberals preferred the first explanation and conservatives the second. To me, both seemed off. Each treated low-income families as if they lived in quarantine. With books about single mothers, gang members, or the homeless, social scientists and journalists were writing about poor people as if they were cut off from the rest of society. The poor were said to be “invisible” or part of “the other America.” The ghetto was treated like “a city within a city.” The poor were being left out of the inequality debate, as if we believed the livelihoods of the rich and the middle class were intertwined but those of the poor and everyone else were not. Where were the rich people who wielded enormous influence over the lives of low-income families and their communities—who were rich precisely because they did so? Why, I wondered, have we documented how the poor make ends meet without asking