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A Harvard Sociologist on Watching Families Lose Their Homes

Matthew Desmond, author of the book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.”Credit...Amir Levy for The New York Times

The first time the sociologist Matthew Desmond rode along during an eviction, he was shocked by the suddenness of “seeing your house turn into not your house in seconds.”

“You see the mover reach past someone to turn on the lights without asking, then open the fridge, open the cupboards,” he recalled recently.

Touches of home are “obliterated instantly” and often just piled up on the curb.

And it doesn’t just happen once.

The movers “can be out from 8 a.m. until sundown,” he continued. “You see one eviction and you’re overcome, but then there’s another one and another one and another one.”

Mr. Desmond, an associate professor at Harvard, has spent the last eight years studying evictions from seemingly every possible angle. His research has made him a rising star in the field and last year won him a MacArthur fellowship, the so-called genius grant.

Now, with “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” to be published on March 1 by Crown, Mr. Desmond aims to bring an overlooked aspect of American poverty and inequality to a broader audience.

“We’ve tended to look through housing to things like neighborhoods or gentrification,” he said over lunch at a deli near Bronx Housing Court, where he was about to offer a reporter a tour. But the difficulty of finding and keeping a roof over one’s head — for many families in eviction court, rent consumes as much as 80 percent of their income, he writes — has become “not just a consequence of poverty, but a cause of poverty.”

Mr. Desmond also offered a parallel between America’s exploding prison system and the drastic growth in evictions, a once relatively rare phenomenon, he asserts, that has become “an epidemic,” particularly in poor African-American neighborhoods.

“Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women,” Mr. Desmond said.

“Evicted,” based on fieldwork Mr. Desmond did in Milwaukee while a graduate student, is already winning rave reviews, with Kirkus hailing it as a “21st-century ‘How the Other Half Lives.’”

The sociologist William Julius Wilson called Mr. Desmond’s research, which combines ethnographic observation with reams of hard-won data, “one of the most comprehensive field studies of the past half-century” and a call to action on par with Michael Harrington’s “The Other America.”

“It’s an eye-opener, even to poverty researchers,” Mr. Wilson said in an interview. “We knew evictions were a problem, but not on the scale that Matt demonstrates.”

“Evicted,” which closely follows eight families and their landlords, both black and white, mostly keeps the data to the endnotes. Written with the vividness of a novel, it offers a dark mirror of middle-class America’s obsession with real estate, laying bare the workings of the low end of the market, where evictions have become just another part of an often lucrative business model.

Mr. Desmond takes the reader inside a landlord networking meeting, where Sherrena (most names in the book are pseudonyms), an African-American fourth-grade teacher turned full-time landlord, extols the moneymaking opportunities in the city’s most blighted neighborhoods. (Her motto: “The hood is good!”)

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Ara Sparkman with her belongings on a Milwaukee street after an eviction in 2010.Credit...Sally Ryan for The New York Times

He sits with tenants while they debate whether to hold back rent money to pay for food or a relative’s funeral, and visits warehouses where the possessions of evicted families are held — if they haven’t just been dumped by the curb.

“There is always a lot of kids’ stuff,” Mr. Desmond said. “Seeing that piled up in the snow is really disturbing.”

In person, Mr. Desmond, 36, mixes low-key friendliness and on-message discipline, expressing polite frustration with conversations about ethnography that focus more on the researcher than the research. An afterword titled “About This Project” — the first place the word “I” appears — was written only after extended urging of his editor, Amanda Cook.

“He was very reluctant to say anything about himself,” said Ms. Cook, who prevailed over more than a dozen other editors in an auction that shot into the high six figures, according to employees at other publishing houses that bid.

That afterword lifts the curtain a little, offering a few paragraphs about Mr. Desmond’s childhood in Winslow, Ariz., where his father was a nondenominational minister and his mother worked various jobs. Money was often tight, and after he left for college the bank repossessed the family home.

Asked about the circumstances of the repossession and its effect on him, Mr. Desmond, an expert observer of others, said he was fuzzy on details and reluctant to “overinterpret” himself.

“The things you’re closest to are often the things you know least about,” he said.

But around that time, he started volunteering with Habitat for Humanity and hanging out with homeless people in Tempe, where he was attending Arizona State University.

“Maybe that was the ethnographic part of me,” he said. “Even growing up the way I did, I was shocked by the level of poverty I saw as a college student. I thought the best way to understand it was to get close to it on the ground level.”

Mr. Desmond’s immersion in evictions began during his graduate student days at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For his dissertation fieldwork, he moved into a rundown trailer park on Milwaukee’s predominantly white South Side, and later to a rooming house on the city’s mainly black North Side. (Sherrena, he reveals in the afterword, was his landlord.) Over 18 months, he let his voice recorder run, capturing interviews and fly-on-the-wall scenes that, when transcribed, ran to nearly 5,000 single-space pages.

Mr. Desmond writes with some sympathy for landlords, who face direct losses, or even foreclosure, when tenants fall behind. But he is also blunt in his moral assessment, brandishing a word that he says has gone missing in the broader poverty debate: “exploitation.”

“Poverty is not just a sad accident,” he said. Yes, it’s partly about lack of jobs, “but it’s also a result of the fact that some people make a lot of money off low-income families and directly contribute to their poverty.”

Mr. Desmond, who has created a website, justshelter.org, which gathers information about housing groups across the country, makes no bones of the advocacy component of his work. But he doesn’t shrink from depicting less than sympathetic behavior by tenants, like the decision by Larraine, a 54-year-old woman who has just been evicted from the trailer park, to blow her monthly food stamps on a single home-cooked lobster dinner.

“I was so angry at Larraine,” he recalled, using stronger language. “I remember calling my wife and saying, ‘What do I do with this? It’s like a Reagan commercial.’ But my job is to write about these things, to help people understand.”

In an endnote, Mr. Desmond describes pressing Larraine for an explanation. The one she finally comes up with — “because I wanted to” — may not satisfy all readers.

But for the extreme poor, Mr. Desmond argues, bad decisions are a result of poverty, more than poverty is a result of bad decisions.

“The difference between stable poverty and Larraine’s kind of poverty is so vast,” he said. “No amount of scrimping and saving is going to get her out.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Studying Families Shattered by Eviction. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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