Author: Matthew Desmond

Desmond moved into a Milwaukee trailer park and then a rooming house on the North Side in 2008 and stayed more than a year, following eight families and the landlords evicting them. Evicted came out of it and took the Pulitzer in 2017, and its central finding is that eviction is not merely a symptom of poverty but a cause of it, deepening what it responds to. He founded the Eviction Lab at Princeton, which built the first national database of eviction records because none existed. Poverty, by America argues that American poverty persists because affluent people benefit from it. His own father was evicted when Desmond was a student.