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Why does the U.S. — the richest country in the world — have the most poverty of any advanced democracy? Why are homeless encampments popping up from Seattle to Burlington?
The answer is that, knowingly or unknowingly, many of us benefit from keeping poor people poor.
That is the argument made by Matthew Desmond in his bestselling new book, “Poverty, by America.” Desmond won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 book, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” which was named by Book Riot as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last century. He is a professor of sociology at Princeton University, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, and was named by Politico in 2016 as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”
He argues that regulations ranging from zoning to environmental laws are being used to block affordable housing, a key factor that is driving the homeless crisis. He says that this problem is often especially acute in communities known for their otherwise progressive politics. Low wages are kept low for the benefit of the more affluent.
“In most residential land in America, it’s illegal to build anything except a single detached family home,” Desmond told The Vermont Conversation. “That little regulation buried inside of our zoning codes really means that the only place poor families can live are neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, concentrated poverty, and that creates a level of disadvantage of a whole other order. I think that we need to think about our role and our complicity in maintaining those walls around our communities.”
Desmond intends his work to be “a call to action. It means that we need to get our tails down to that zoning board meeting on a Thursday night at eight o’clock and stand up and say, Look, I refuse to be a segregationist. I refuse to deny other kids opportunities my kids receive living here. Let’s build [affordable housing].”
Matthew Desmond’s work is grounded in his own experience growing up in poverty. He started studying housing, poverty, and eviction in 2008, when he lived among poor tenants and their landlords in Milwaukee. He now directs the Eviction Lab at Princeton, and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, where “Poverty, By America” was recently excerpted.
Desmond wants to inspire a new abolitionist movement. “Poverty abolitionists view poverty not as a minor social issue or an inevitability, but as an abomination,” he said. “It shares with other abolitionist movements — the movement to abolish slavery [and] prisons, for example — the recognition, the conviction, that if my gain comes at someone else’s loss, that’s corrupting in a way.”
“A poverty abolitionist divests from exploitation even if it benefits us. We try to shop and invest in solidarity with poor workers,” he said. “We want a government that has a balanced and sensible welfare state, a government that does much more to fight poverty than to alleviate the tax burdens of the affluent. And we are for integrated communities and open, inclusive neighborhoods.”
Poverty abolitionism “is a political mission,” said Desmond, “but it’s also a personal stance.”