Ultimately, though, he comes across as being more honorable than Tarver, if only because he doesn’t pretend his tenants are anything more than a means to an end: money.ĭesmond follows a wide variety of poor renters to demonstrate the effects of poverty and eviction. He is also driven by self-interest and a lack of empathy for his tenants.

Charney-old, white, and taciturn-is less of a figure in the book. At the same time, she has a pathological blindness to this and perpetually sees herself as a victim of malign forces surrounding her: tenants, building inspectors, employees, and the legal system. As the narrative progresses, however, readers discover she has forgone any semblance of morality or compassion as she extracts as much money as possible from both her tenants and her employees. At first, she seems like an exemplar of the American Dream, someone who has pulled herself up by her own bootstraps. Tarver, a younger black woman and former elementary school teacher who builds her own real estate empire from nothing, is the focus of much of the book. To this end, Desmond spends a significant amount of time detailing two landlords: Sherrena Tarver and Tobin Charney, both of whom own rental property worth millions of dollars. He saw eviction being a product of the relationship between the rich and poor, and he decided to focus on both groups to discover how the eviction process played out in practice. Desmond was interested, however, in more than just writing about poor people and the places they lived. Throughout much of 20, he lived among poverty-stricken renters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, first on the predominately white South Side and then the black North Side.

Subsequently, as a graduate sociology student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he decided to conduct his own ethnographic study. As an undergraduate at Arizona State University, Desmond became interested in the subject of eviction and discovered there were almost no wide-ranging studies or statistical data available.

Evicted novel