Spiraling: Evictions and Other Causes and Consequences of Housing Instability

In Evicted, Professor Matthew Desmond offers an alternative narrative, in which the complexities and path dependence of how housing instability occurs and is reinforced limit low-income households’ access to housing, separate and apart from the dynamics of housing supply. This Book Review will proceed in three parts. Part I will describe the contributions Desmond’s study makes to our understanding of the market that poor families face when they try to find an apartment, the complex relationships with landlords that affect how those families maintain or lose their apartments, and the consequences of housing instability for individuals and families. Part II will discuss how certain well-intended interventions — for example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) final rule on Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs)5 — ignore, or provide insufficient solutions to, the problems Desmond reveals. Finally, Part III will argue that Desmond’s work points the way to better housing policy and will propose granular, attainable reforms to policies and practices that should be reexamined in light of Desmond’s (and others’) findings about the struggles families face in finding and staying in better housing and more nurturing neighborhoods.