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Matthew Desmond in Milwaukee
‘On the one hand, you know you have something that matters. On the other hand, you have it because people you’re close to suffered for it’ … Matthew Desmond in Milwaukee. Photograph: Michael Kienitz
‘On the one hand, you know you have something that matters. On the other hand, you have it because people you’re close to suffered for it’ … Matthew Desmond in Milwaukee. Photograph: Michael Kienitz

Matthew Desmond: ‘I want my work to bear witness to this problem that’s raging in our cities’

This article is more than 8 years old

Aditya Chakrabortty spends the day meeting residents of the poorest parts of Milwaukee with the author of the acclaimed book Evicted

It hadn’t even hit 9am on the publication day of Matthew Desmond’s big book – the one that was all over the liberal American newspapers, the one that would turn him from promising young scholar into go-to intellectual – and already the train was tilting off its rails.

Ahead of him lay a TV interview, a lunch at a local university, a bookshop appearance. His publicity duties also included driving me around Milwaukee, visiting the scenes and subjects of his book about urban poverty in the US, Evicted. But straight after arriving in Milwaukee from Harvard, Desmond receives bad news on his phone. His friend Scott had been found last night passed out – no one knew whether it was due to drink or something worse. It wasn’t clear where he was now, nor who was looking after him.

Scott features in Evicted, which charts the real-life struggles of eight men and women in Milwaukee for stable housing and a life that allows them some hope. By the book’s end, Scott (all interviewees’ names are pseudonyms, in the book and here) is the sole success story. The opioid addiction that took his job, his car and his house is receding into memory. There is a new home and a list of five‑year goals that includes “Back to nursing” and “Start a savings account”. Those good intentions were dissolving and Desmond didn’t know how to help. “He is such a sweet man. He is just fighting something right now.”

If Scott needed him, he’d have to go. Could this interview be pushed back a bit? He sighed. “I kind of feel like we’re on duty.”

Given a lighter moment, Desmond might have recognised in this one of his themes. Evicted shows how the smallest event can rip through poor lives, sending them spinning out of control. “You have to allow their problems to be your problems.” The chaos was the work, was the vocation. “It’s ethnography, right: you kind of start your day with no idea of what’s going to happen and you might find yourself skulking back to your room at 2am.”

The book opens on a winter’s afternoon in Milwaukee, that frozen city on the banks of Lake Michigan, with a 13-year-old boy lobbing snowballs at passing cars. One driver jumps out, chases Jori home and kicks in the door. The landlady slings out the family of three. They spend months in a homeless shelter, before shifting to a house in the inner city. The water can’t be counted on so Jori has to bucket out what’s in the toilet bowl, yet his mother, Arleen Belle, revels in the space and names it “my favourite place”. Until, that is, the city declares it unfit for human habitation. More moves follow, into an area notorious for its drug dealers, and then a grim two-bed.

“Cleaning didn’t do it much good,” notes Desmond, “what with its cracked windows, ravaged carpet, and broken bathroom.”

For this unit in one of the worst neighbourhoods in the fourth-poorest city in the US, she pays $550 (£385) a month, or 88% of her $628 in benefits. However exorbitant the rent, it’s not unusual. She can’t find anything cheaper, and no landlord will rent her family anything smaller. She is left with $2.60 a day to pay for heat, lights and clothing for her and her two boys.

And it began with a snowball.

This is a taste of the torrent of detail and sadness that makes up much of the book. America has a fine tradition of writing that bears witness to social injustice – think of Upton Sinclair, Studs Terkel, Barbara Ehrenreich – but Desmond’s book comes at an especially ripe moment. From Paul Krugman to Jeb Bush, US intellectuals and politicians on both left and right are starting to talk seriously about the gulf between the rich and the rest of us. But just as with their counterparts in Britain, this conversation is overly fond of generalisations and stylised facts, and happier talking about the poor, rather than to them.

Desmond’s method is the opposite. In May 2008, the then-PhD student moved to Milwaukee to live among the poorest people in one of the world’s richest countries. First he lived in a mainly white trailer park and then, until the end of 2009, in a rooming house in the black north side. As the US lurched from subprime crisis to banking catastrophe to economic collapse, he interviewed tenants, landlords, officials and eviction crews.

‘Poverty in Milwaukee makes stable family life impossible for those at the bottom.’ Photograph by Matthew Desmond

He watched renters having screaming arguments, heard them dial number after number in the vain hope of finding a sympathetic landlord, sat in court as the judge evicted them just before Christmas, accompanied them to the drug rehab clinic that has a queue out the door from dawn.

He wove himself into their everyday lives so as to “move like they move, talk like they talk, think like they think, and feel something like they feel”. Then he embedded this ethnographic evidence in numbers: court records, logs of more than a million 911 calls to Milwaukee police, and specially commissioned surveys of renters and evictees. The result is a scholarly rigorous book that conveys more news than a cable bulletin, an academic work unafraid to get angry. As the US prepares to elect a new president, Evicted both points out what’s missing from the TV debates and hints at the noisy resentment that shapes current US politics.

It provides an intimate portrait of what it’s like to be powerless in the world’s superpower. These people have neither money nor connections, and no family able to provide sustained help. Landlords won’t fix their overflowing sinks. The police only lock up their men or taunt their boys, while government officials just want to catch them out. When they are eventually tossed onto the streets, the message is clear: this country has no home for you.

To British eyes, the narrative reads like a dispatch from the near-future. Here, workfare – forcing those on benefits either to work or to take training – is still a novelty, in Milwaukee it is ground into the fabric of daily life. There is the same dependence on food banks and “sack lunches” from the local church; the same stories of people refused vital benefits because the letters summoning them to some appointment were sent to an old address; the same withholding of legal advice to those who need it most. And, as the UK housing bill faces ever growing protest, it shows Britons what happens when you do away with social housing: family after family attempts the residential maths of making benefits or low wages cover the cost of private renting – and finds it just can’t be done.

Rather than launch in New York or Washington, Desmond had picked Milwaukee. Chugging around the city in a people carrier, he found his memory kept tugging at him: this diner was where he hung out with Arleen’s landlady, Sherrena, who boasted that the “hood is good” for making profits; that gas station was where Scott had bumped into Heroin Susie. He also found himself “stepping right back” into the struggles of his friends. Not just Scott, but Arleen who was today searching out accommodation for her homeless daughter.

Photograph by Matthew Desmond

Outwardly, Desmond has little in common with the people he writes about. Most of them are black; he is white. They are from the northern inner-city, he was raised in a small southern town whose proudest moment was a namecheck by the Eagles in “Take It Easy” (“Well, I’m standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona … ”). He grew up playing American football and hunting elk, in what sounds like a living enactment of a Norman Rockwell painting. Evicted shows how poverty and prisons make stable family life impossible for those at the bottom; the author grew up in “a loving home”. His preacher father told the kids that to get on, they only needed to work hard.

University shook out that notion. “I left college with a deep sense that I needed to understand poverty more.” A gifted student, he sailed into one of America’s top sociology departments at Madison, Wisconsin and published a book on firefighters while doing his masters.

At only 36, Desmond is a professor at Harvard and has just won a MacArthur grant, the $625,000 (£440,000) award, handed out in the past to the author of Freakonomics, Steven Levitt, and French economist Esther Duflo. He is young enough to reference Outkast and Wu-Tang Clan, but so feted that the prizes of the US’s academic-industrial complex will keep dropping into his lap. The gulf between him and his interviewees can often be hard to bridge.

He remembered visiting one of Arleen’s cousins at home on the day of Obama’s inauguration, in January 2009. The north side of Milwaukee was festooned with Obama flags, “this amazing display of pride and political engagement”. They stepped into the house to find everyone crowded around the TV “and Aretha’s there with her hat”. He was the only white guy. “So a young woman started cleaning up and apologising to me for the house being messy. There was this tension. I felt like I took all the air out of the room.”

All morning on book launch day, weather forecasters had been gleefully threatening a snow storm – now it was coming. We went to pick up his friend, Vanetta. In the book, the last we see of her is as she is sent to jail for helping an armed robbery. The 21-year-old doesn’t deny the crime, but pleads that her restaurant shifts had been slashed from five days to one, that she wakes at 5am to care for her kids, study and find a place to live, that she is fundamentally decent.

This is the point in the book where Desmond finally cuts loose. He reads into the moment all the power relations and wasted potential and imagines how, in a less volatile economy, Vanetta, the lawyers and the judge need never have been here.

She could have kept her hours, found a flat for her kids free of asbestos, become a nurse “and maybe you would eventually come to feel that you were worth something and deserving of a man … who didn’t break down your door and beat you in front of your children. Maybe you would meet someone with a steady job and get married in a small church … [and] your groom would introduce you as ‘my wife’.” But the justice system won’t allow that, “because you were poor then and you are poor now”. She is sent to prison, her five-year-old staring back “stone-faced, strong, just like his momma had taught him”.

Seven years later, here was Vanetta climbing in the back of the car to see Desmond do his TV spot. She’d taken the day off work and brought a pair of heels to change into. Nursing hadn’t happened, but she was working as a cook and had a fiance.

The interview for local public television was at Marquette university. It’s a large campus that sprawls over the city centre, but Vanetta had never been inside any of its buildings. While Desmond was corralled off, she sat in the studio audience, swiping through the photos on her phone showing the rottenness of her flat. The interview soon shifted to the human stories.

Photograph by Matthew Desmond

“I’ll never forget this one day,” said Desmond. “It was with Vanetta and Crystal … and they were homeless, and they were at McDonald’s and this boy walks in.”

“His clothes were dishevelled and ... he was looking for scraps. And Vanetta and Crystal pooled their money and bought him lunch.

“The poor don’t want some small life. They don’t want to game the system. They want to contribute and they want to thrive. But poverty reduces people born for better things.”

Now Vanetta was nodding. As the recording ended, she whispered how proud she was.

Desmond doesn’t mind if you call him journalistic. “I want my work to influence public conversation, to turn heads, and to bear witness to this problem that’s raging in our cities. If journalism helps me with that I’ll draw on journalism… and I’m not going to worry too much if academics get troubled over that distinction.”

His main reading at the moment is the fourth novel in the Harry Potter series to his six-year-old (“Stuff’s about to go down. Someone’s about to die. He’s enjoying it.”), one of the two boys he raises near Harvard with wife and fellow academic Tessa. There is talk of being involved in a granola co-operative, and a reminder of how different his trajectory is from his subjects. As for his students, they aren’t set textbooks on ethnographic method but study David Foster Wallace and Joan Didion. “This is what observational genius looks like.”

Passing a 50-something man standing in the middle of the road with a sign reading, “Homeless, will work for work. God bless”, we drove on to the trailer park that was Desmond’s first home in Milwaukee. Miles from any shop, two rows of pinched caravans faced each other. “It’s hard to do anything here without everyone noticing it. There’s an echo chamber effect.” As if on cue, a manager hurried over to ask what we were doing. As the snow covered our boots, Desmond remarked that in all the months he had lived here, he’d had no hot water.

Writing up the interviews for the book, he found himself with 5,000 pages of notes – and a deep sense of guilt. In his journal, he admitted, “I feel dirty, collecting these stories and hardships like so many trophies.” Listening to the arguments and interviews from the world he’d left behind, while in the comfort of American academia brought on “a depression: it affected my marriage.

Photograph by Matthew Desmond

I knew we had a shot at changing the public conversation, or at least we had a shot at making a sociological contribution. But that meant seeing this terrible thing. That’s a conflicting thing,” he said. “On the one hand, you know you have something that matters. On the other hand, you have it because people you’re close to suffered for it.”

Although they became his friends, his interviewees might not want all their humiliations in print – but here he quoted Didion: “A writer is always selling somebody out.”

Evening had arrived, and it was almost time for the bookshop appearance. Arleen rang: she’d been out all day looking for accommodation, but now everything was shut and she could make it out. On picking her up, Desmond presented her with a copy of Evicted and an article in the New Yorker. Arleen’s eyes widened.

“Me in a book, in a magazine? It just got real.”

Boswell’s book store was heaving with around 300 people. Nearly all white and clasping copies of the New York Times, they gasped at the numbers, laughed at the jokes and ended with a standing ovation. As the evening dissolved into a book signing, Arleen stood there. Her eyes were red, whether with tiredness or sadness I couldn’t tell. She stroked the cover of the book that told her story. “This is my weakness … and my strength.”

Early tomorrow she would begin again the search for a home for her daughter. For Desmond the next three days held: a drive to the Wisconsin state capital of Madison for a lecture at his old university; a flight back to Harvard to do an event and have a celebration with friends, and then another flight to Washington. Then New York, Atlanta and London.

His editor, passed on how she’d heard Arleen tell a young reporter who she really was. “Really?” Desmond was intrigued, then increasingly pleased.

“Maybe she’ll own her story. Maybe she’ll start to tell it herself.”

Evicted is published by Allen Lane in hardback and as an audiobook. Matthew Desmond will be speaking in London on 23 March. See 5x15.com for tickets.

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