Desmond’s “Evicted”: A Condescending View of the Homeless

I summarized last week reviews of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, a book published in 2016 that uses Dickens-like characters and won a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Two months ago, the New York Times even put Evicted in 21st place on its list of 100 books of the 21st century. A Chronicle of Higher Education writer called Desmond “sociology’s next great hope.”

One problem, though, is that Evicted offers almost no hope. Based on my experience, I’d say that those who talk about personal causes of poverty and those who talk about structural/societal causes are both right: People are poor for both reasons, and the proportion varies from individual to individual, but I’ve never seen it 100% one way or the other way. Desmond, though, is an absolutist: Poor people have “so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty.”

One of his examples is “Larraine” (not her real name). Desmond acknowledges that she could have saved money so she was not in eviction danger, but she preferred to buy jewelry, perfume, and a new television and bed. Instead of using SNAP (food stamp) money for food throughout the month, she feasted for a moment on “two lobster tails, shrimp, king crab legs, salad, and lemon meringue pie. . . . She ate everything alone, in a single sitting, washing it down with Pepsi. The meal consumed her entire monthly allocation of food stamps.”

Those close to Larraine saw her infantile behavior and called her on it. A niece who had worked hard to have her own hairstyling shop said, “My aunt Larraine is one of those people who will see some two-hundred-dollar beauty cream that removes her wrinkles and will go and buy it instead of paying the rent. I don’t know why she just doesn’t stick to a budget.” Larraine’s pastor criticized her “poverty mentality.”

Desmond hears those close to Larraine saying she’s “poor because she threw money away,” but he states, “Larraine threw money away because she was poor.” What? He explains, “Those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny.” That’s just not true: Larraine’s niece and pastor had hope.

Desmond advises critics “that when you talk about this book, you talk first about Sherrena and Tobin.” Okay: He refers 791 times to landlord Sherrena Tarver — that’s a pseudonym — who seems like a she-monster carving up tenants and making money-grasping decisions that leaves families homeless. Desmond introduces his other main landlord character (who makes 267 appearances) with this line: The “owner of the trailer park was named Tobin Charney.”

No, he was not named that: Desmond chose for an alias that Jewish first name (from the Hebrew word “tov,” which means “good”), and that last name, Charney, which suggests fiery results. Desmond does not say Tobin is Jewish, but drops in the detail that the 71-year-old “lived 70 miles away, in Skokie, Illinois.” Skokie was majority Jewish in the 1960s and 1970s when it received national attention after Nazis, supported by the ACLU for First Amendment reasons, planned to march there. The city today is host to the Illinois Holocaust Museum.

We learn that Tobin is “a hard man with squinting eyes and an unsmiling face.” The 71-year-old kept “a gym bag in the trunk of his Cadillac. . . . All Tobin desired was one address and 131 trailers.” When caseworkers or ministers would call and say “Please,” or “Wait just a minute,” Tobin would reply, “Pay me the rent.” Here’s how one eviction transpired: “Pam tried changing Tobin’s mind by signing over the $1,200 check she had just received as part of Obama’s economic stimulus act. . . . Tobin accepted Pam’s stimulus check but moved forward with the eviction anyway.”

Simple, yes? Gouging Tobin makes people homeless, yes? No. As Austin poverty-fighter Mark Hilbelink says about homelessness, “It’s wicked hard.” I wrote last month about Rob Henderson’s hit book that also has a one-word title, Troubled. Henderson invented the term “luxury beliefs” to refer to what he encountered while a student at Yale. For example, a classmate who had benefited from growing up in a stable two-parent family denigrated monogamy and thought the poor did not need marriage.

Desmond displays luxury beliefs. Believing the poor have no agency, he starts Evicted with a rhyme from Langston Hughes: “I wish the rent / was heaven sent.” That scans better than “government sent,” and it reflects well a modern reliance on Government rather than God, but has that reliance worked for the people purportedly helped?