When Matthew Desmond was growing up, money was tight. Sometimes the gas got shut off, and his parents eventually lost their home to foreclosure. This week, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his nonfiction book Evicted, which is about eight families in Milwaukee and their evictions. Vivid and unsettling: it’s a difficult book to read. The stories are sad, but the facts are even more unpleasant: only one of four low-income households that qualify for housing assistance gets it. Where do most of the subsidies for housing go? To families with six-figure incomes, who receive tax benefits for home ownership.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Crown, 2016, p. 295.