People used to protest-they sat on the furniture and didn’t let marshals move the family out. Kinniburgh: Have evictions always been so widespread?ĭesmond: If you read urban history and you run across an eviction scene, you are left with the impression that evictions used to be rare and scandalous. And if you ask where we’re seeing the crisis, it’s concentrated in the southeast of the nation-which is not where I thought we would see evictions exploding, because these are traditionally fairly low-cost housing markets. I thought that was pretty high-and it is high-but we’re seeing cities in America that have double the eviction rate of Milwaukee, almost approaching triple. The second big thing that struck me is that-you know, I spent a lot of time studying this problem in Milwaukee, and in Milwaukee, citywide, it’s about one in twenty-five renter homes that are evicted every year. So that number is, I think, quite conservative. These aren’t informal evictions these aren’t illegal lockouts or buyouts. The second is that these are just formal, court-ordered evictions. One is that we don’t have every eviction record in the United States-we’re still missing a lot. And 2.3 million is definitely an underestimate, for two reasons.

That’s thirty-six times the number of people that died from an overdose in 2016. How do we get our hands around that number? That’s twice the number of people that got arrested on drug possession charges. By our calculations, in 2016, 2.3 million people lived in homes that received an eviction notice. Matthew Desmond: First of all, before this project, we didn’t know how many people got evicted every year. Here, we present a photo-essay adapted from that exhibition, alongside a brief interview with Desmond about the scope of the eviction epidemic-and how we might solve it.Ĭolin Kinniburgh: Earlier this year, you and a team of colleagues launched the Eviction Lab, the first-ever nationwide database of evictions. The exhibition features photographs by Sasha Israel, Michael Kienitz, and Sally Ryan as well as striking infographics and short videos. Now, the work of Desmond and his colleagues has a visual companion in Evicted, the exhibition, currently on display at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. Drawing on the book’s fine-grained account of how eviction plays out in Milwaukee, the country’s most segregated city, he has since sought to assemble a more panoramic, national picture of this crisis as the founder of the Eviction Lab, based at Princeton University. Since the publication of his book Evicted in 2016, sociologist Matthew Desmond has become the best-known chronicler of a quiet epidemic sweeping the United States today: eviction. Matthew Desmond and Colin Kinniburgh ▪ Fall 2018 Sociologist Matthew Desmond discusses the scope of the eviction epidemic-and how ordinary people are fighting back.

Evicted book