Turns Out Evictions Are More Complicated and Venal Than I Realized

 

This On the Media segment on Eviction is worth listening to.  The issue of housing segregation and evictions is not about how hard people work, but techniques designed to keep people unhoused.  

"It isn't as much about poverty as it is about extracting wealth from the poorest people."

Around 12:30 in the audio, Matt Desmond — Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, and founder of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University - begins.  Be sure to listen to him.  

Some things I learned in this episode. 

• Rents in poor neighborhoods are not that much lower than rents in much nicer neighborhoods, but for poor people, especially people of color, they can't rent a place in those areas. 
• Landlords renting in poor neighborhoods have a higher profit margin than those in better neighborhoods
• All of this traces back to the great migration of Blacks from the South to the North.  
• Presence of children increases the odds of eviction.  

I recommend you listen while your doing some mindless task, like cleaning the bathroom, kneading bread, shredding old paperwork, etc.  

What I heard on the radio was apparently taken from several of the segments you can find them all at the link at the beginning of the post.