Evicted: Epilogue: Home and Hope Summary & Analysis

Home is the core of a person’s identity, a place of safety and certainty. Proper participation in society starts at home; a good home life makes people better citizens. Feeling a sense of belonging and ownership of one’s community is vital to being a good neighbor. It is basically impossible to improve oneself without stable housing. Once Scott received secure, affordable housing through the Guest House, he was able to find and keep a job and stay off heroin. He is still sober today. The Hinkstons, meanwhile, found a pleasant three-bedroom in Brownsville, Tennessee, and once there Patrice earned her GED and was named “Adult Learner of the Year.” She hopes to become a parole officer and help those caught up in the criminal justice system.

If Arleen and Vanetta had been able to find secure housing that didn’t use up 80% of their income each month, they likely would have been able to make similar improvements in their lives. As it is, their existence was consumed by the struggle to make rent and avoid eviction. There is actually a broad consensus that people should not have to spend more than 30% of their income and rent, but this conviction is not reflected in the current reality. The result is millions of people being evicted each year. 

Until recently there was a dearth of research on the topic of eviction. Researchers have long known that poor people move frequently, but haven’t figured out why. The truth is that forced moves aside, poor people move at the same rate as other groups—yet their rate of forced moves is staggering. Housing instability causes unemployment, loss of possessions, hunger, interruption of welfare, and many other forms of “material hardship.” Eviction also leads to more eviction, creating an endless cycle of housing instability.

People who are evicted are often forced into more dangerous neighborhoods where crime and drug use is rife. Eviction is known to cause depression, psychological instability, and even suicide. Eviction also erodes community, as tenants move around so much that there is never enough time for strangers to become neighbors. It is partly for this reason that a high eviction rate in a given area corresponds to an increased crime rate. The conclusion of all this evidence of the harm eviction causes is that “eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.”

Eviction affects all kinds of people, but poor women of color and their children suffer its effects at a disproportionate rate. In Milwaukee, 1 in 5 black female renters has been evicted, compared to 1 in 12 Hispanic women and 1 in 15 white women. Most evictions involve children, and eviction is a central cause of child homelessness. It can ruin the lives of children before they have even truly begun. Poor families live “above their means” in the sense that they are paying far more than they can afford for rent, yet they are renting the very cheapest and least desirable units on the market, as in most cases there is simply no other option.

The suffering of poor renters is unnecessary, and this means that there exists the possibility of change. If change is to happen, Americans must confront the question of whether housing is a human right. The Declaration of Independence states that every American has the right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Yet without decent housing, none of these other rights are possible. Housing is obviously a need, and thus everyone in America should be able to secure decent housing they can afford.

Some progress has already been made. Yet the public housing that was designed to replace slums has become a kind of slum itself, and the ritualistic destruction of crime-ridden public housing towers is now a frequent spectacle. In addition to public housing, there is the voucher system, which ensures that tenants pay no more than 30% of their income on rent. This program has been proven to help lift people out of poverty by freeing up people’s income to spend on other things. Yet as Evicted has shown, very few eligible renters receive housing vouchers. In 2013, 1% of poor tenants lived in rent-controlled units, 15% in public housing, and 17% received assistance, usually a housing voucher. This leaves 67% with no federal support at all.

Housing should be one of the most urgent priorities of the federal government. Beyond housing vouchers, other changes need to be made, too. For example, while 90% of landlords have legal representation, 90% of tenants do not. This needs to change through legal aid to poor people. Good lawyers would help poor people from being unjustly treated by landlords and make it less easy to evict people.

If housing is a right, then there can’t also be a right to make as much profit as possible from poor people. The concept of exploitation needs to be re-centered in discussions of poverty. Raising wages and welfare payments will only help eliminate poverty if measures are taken to ensure all this increased income doesn’t go straight to landlords’ pockets. It is patently unjust that it is possible to make large profits from the very poorest communities. In order to balance the right to housing with certain important economic freedoms, Desmond recommends expanding the housing voucher program to include all low-income families.     

With a universal voucher program, eviction rates would go down and homelessness would be virtually nonexistent. Neighborhoods would stabilize and flourish. Universal housing programs exist across the developed world, including places like the UK and the Netherlands. Many nations use a voucher system, partly because this is more cost-effective than constructing public (or public-private) housing. Furthermore, placing high concentrations of low-income people in the same blocks or districts stimulates segregation. Some people worry that a universal housing voucher would disincentivize people to work, but as the book has shown, housing instability is actually a far greater threat to work.

Discrimination against voucher holders, which is currently rampant, should be made illegal. This would benefit landlords as well as voucher recipients, because it would mean a steady supply of stable and reliable tenants. It would also be vital to stabilize rent, or else the housing voucher program would have an unnecessarily high cost. In 2013, the Bipartisan Policy Center estimated that a universal housing voucher for all renters in the bottom 30% of income would cost an extra $22.5 billion than what is already being spent, brining housing assistance in total to $60 billion. Yet this figure does not account for the money that would be saved through a reduction in current spending on homelessness, healthcare, and other costs associated with housing instability. 

There is certainly enough money for a universal housing voucher program, especially when you consider how much is currently spent on homeowner benefits such as the mortgage-interest deduction and capital-gains exclusion, which far exceeds that spent on housing assistance. At the moment, most federal housing subsidies go to people with six-figure incomes. A universal housing voucher is only one potential solution, and it is possible that different parts of the country will require different approaches. Yet it is beyond doubt that the suffering caused by housing insecurity is abhorrent and cannot be allowed to continue.