When Matthew Desmond comes to Milwaukee, it’s a little like coming home.
About 17 years ago, Desmond lived on Milwaukee’s north and south sides to learn, up close, about people affected by eviction and how devastating it can be for those already living near the edge. His book on that research, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2017.
Now a sociologist at Princeton University, Desmond typically comes to Milwaukee for events and speeches, like the one he gave April 30 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee under the title of his follow-up book, “Poverty by America.”
Seeing Desmond would be in town, Nolan Murray, an English teacher at Carmen Southeast High School on Milwaukee’s south side, figured he would take a shot and invite him to his class. Murray assigns his students to read “Evicted.”
To Murray’s surprise, Desmond accepted.
“Home is the center of life,” Desmond told about two dozen students on May 1. “If we don’t have a stable home over our heads, everything else falls apart.”
“Whatever you care about, whatever keeps you up at night, whether it’s education, whether it’s how safe your city is, social mobility, the environment, housing, the housing crisis plays a huge role in that,” he added.
Matthew Desmond signs his book, ‘Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City’ after speaking to students at Carmen SE High School on May 1.
Desmond also described how income has stayed flat as rent prices have soared while the government has done little to create or encourage affordable housing. He noted the Trump administration has put the U.S. Housing and Urban Development offices in Washington D.C. up for sale.
“So it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get any serious extension of help when it comes to addressing the housing crisis from the Trump administration,” he said.
Bryan Lopez, 17, a student in Murray’s class, asked Desmond how he and other students could get the government to do more.
Speak up for what you believe in, Desmond said. He noted that during the pandemic, special funding bills that paused evictions and increased food subsidies helped cut child poverty rates, but few celebrated that.
“It was an enormous historic effect, but no one really said anything, like, ‘This is the kind of society we want,'” he said.
One student asked what sticks most from his time in Milwaukee. Desmond talked about how a family whose heat was out in February asked if he could look at the furnace.
It was a ruse to get him upstairs so they could surprise him with a cake for his birthday.
“Their heat was off in February. It wasn’t a joke, but that’s the kind of generosity they had,” he said. “I think that’s just a beautiful reminder of how people refuse to be reduced to their hardships.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Matthew Desmond, author of ‘Evicted,’ talks to Milwaukee high school
Read the full article here
