Evicted tells the story of multiple people and families living in grinding poverty in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the end of the first decade of this century. It's a deeply personal look at how eviction shapes not just the lives of those evicted, but their school systems and their larger communities as well.

I'm a bit ashamed at how little I knew of eviction and how it works. I always assumed it to be a process with thirty days of notice and only if the renter falls so far behind on their rent. That is not the case. That is almost never the case. Renters can and are evicted for a variety of reasons, some of which are vindictive and cruel. When there is a list a mile long of people trying to get into any type of lower income housing, there is no incentive for landlords to work with renters or to ever fix up their properties. Desperate people will live in some horrendous places simply because those places offer more security than the streets.

It was painful to watch as families featured in this book lost everything time and time again, only able to take with them clothes in garbage bags. I cried when a family had their belongings tossed out on the curb and ruined in a torrential downpour. Families and individuals often had to decide between trying to keep the gas and heat on to keep their children from the clutches of social services or trying to stay current on rent. So often these families had to borrow from Peter to pay Paul. Frequently landlords would take a tenant's money, sometimes all the money to the tenant's name, and then evict them anyway because the amount was still a few dollars too short.

The eight families featured in this book are a mix of black and white. Their struggles are similar. Sometimes drugs are involved in their situations and sometimes they are not. These people were all willing to work to try to make the rent. They were not freeloaders or "welfare queens". One was even a former nurse who once made 80,000 dollars a year, but lost his job and his license after becoming addicted to pain killers. The licensing board made it nearly impossible for him to ever get his license back, so what incentive would he ever have for trying to get clean?

All too often we focus on punitive measures instead of healing and reconciliation. Justice, even in the face of drug crimes or money owed, is not continued suffering. Justice should NEVER be continued suffering. In his book, Desmond outlines solutions for the urban poor housing crisis. We as a country our failing our poor and failing generations to come and in doing so we are failing ourselves. We can do better. We must do better.