I read Evicted. Great book! A must read.

Word of advice to anyone who picks it up. Read the final chapter or two first. It's where he gets into the weeds of the data and such. If you start at the beginning and get bored, get distracted, give up, etc. before the end you're going to miss the best part.

Don't get me wrong, the stories are great. But just the same it gets disheartening, if not depressing.

I read this over christmas and was completely engrossed (to the extent of being borderline antisocial).

I can certainly understand how you might find it disheartening and depressing, but I don't know I could quite see bored. The retelling of the situations was captivating, and the descriptions of how the system fails those most in need was harrowing at times. I've been recommending it to anyone who will listen.

I'm not saying __I__ got bored :)

However, the truth is, plenty of books get started and are never finished. Since the bit at the end was so factually important to the discussion of the issue, I didn't want that to be missed.

Imho, he should have started there.

I'm certainly guilty of getting partway through books and never returning, but I don't know that if I'd jumped into the data first I would have been so engrossed.

(Obviously this is entirely a personal perspective.)

Engrossed? Maybe not. But a lot of myths would have been busted. For me, it's about trying to understand an issue, bumping into some ignorant ahole, and being able to say "read this book...read __this chapter__."

Few enjoy such books. But more need to be more aware of the (data) truths that define the issue.

The data on the number of deaths from domestic violence in cities/states that have a law for penalizing landlords with properties with too many police calls was infuriating.

I would advise the opposite of this. Many of his solutions listed at the end are ineffective, poorly researched and/or totally impractical ("more rent control!", "socialize all housing!"). It's telling that he doesn't seem to have spoken to any economists about any of the things he proposes.

The real value of that book is in the stories and descriptions of the inner workings of how evictions work in the two cities he profiles, which it does an excellent job telling throughout the rest of the book, and because of that I would highly recommend it.

If it helps, Evicted recently won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction. Great book.

On the other hand, bad neighbors ARE a thing. There are tenants who play loud music day and night. Tenants who smoke in non-smoking units. Tenants whose dogs bark at everyone walking by. It seems like management has their hands tied and it's already quite difficult to evict, at least in cities where I've lived.

The main predatory business practice detailed in Evicted is selective tolerance of nonpayment. Let a tenant get behind on rent, then evict them for it if they become inconvenient in some other way (like invoking their rights).

It’s not clear what would be better. Should landlords always evict at the first missed check? That seems even more cruel. Or never? That has a certain appeal as a revolutionary-socialist redistribution of all apartments to their current occupants, but also means no more rental market going forward, or least higher prices on honest payers to cover the risk of deadbeats.

My takeaway from Evicted was that rents are too high and wages are too low, and regulation is a hopelessly ineffective way to paper over those structural problems.

The biggest problem I saw in Evicted were slum lords renting out homes that are legally unfit to live in because they were preying on the desperate...

There was a story later in the book about a slum lord's property that burned down because she cheaped out on fire detectors. Her tenant lost her baby but the slum lord walked away with even more money from insurance to buy 3 more properties.

The same slum lord took advantage of government housing incentives too by renting her dilapidated apartments at artificially higher rents to those lucky enough to be in a government program. Not to even mention how most of the tenants that are evicted can't even afford to literally get to the court house for the hearing.