Eviction has become a prominent topic of academic research, public debate, journalistic investigation, and artistic expression in recent years, spurred largely by the 2016 publication of sociologist Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted. Set in Milwaukee, it painstakingly describes the lives of poor tenants and their landlords and contemplates solutions to the nation’s eviction epidemic. Since the book’s release, Desmond has opened the Eviction Lab, a research center at Princeton University, where he teaches, and spearheaded various projects to raise public awareness of the problem. Among them is a traveling exhibition called “Evicted,” which debuted at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., and recently made its way to Milwaukee. The exhibit combines audio and visual representation of statistics and personal stories in conjunction with work by architecture students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Last weekend we took a road trip to check it out.
MD: Yeah, to be honest, I had a hard time taking that part of the exhibition seriously. I like looking at little models of buildings, that’s cute. But it just felt jarringly theoretical. Did it have a serious purpose?
MD: Presenting eviction with evictees at the center, like the exhibition does is, on the one hand, necessary so people understand just how bad this is as a phenomenon. Yet it makes it seem like a natural disaster. But you can’t ignore the filthy lucre and the very real exploitation that happens in the rental market. Desmond’s book makes sure that you’re thinking about the landlord throughout, but the part of the exhibition that was about landlords didn’t go as far. Did you see that 37 percent of the real estate transactions in 2016 were homes sold to people who weren’t living in them? I just feel like that’s the central tension here. We know very little about how landlords operate, what kind of money they make. Desmond has this podcast now with On the Media about eviction, and in it he phrases it very eloquently: How much is enough profit? Where do we draw the line on “reasonable” landlord income? And if there is no ceiling on profit, then is housing something that should be subject to that kind of logic?
AR: Which is why every person can theoretically get behind the call for “more affordable housing”—which is, I hate to say, very misleading.
Through 9/30: Fri 5-8 PM, Sat 10 AM-4 PM, Mobile Design Box, 753 N. 27th St., Milwaukee, 414-265-9265, umw.edu. F
