Why is there an eviction crisis in the United States? How much is a household supposed to pay in rent?
Matthew Desmond, the author of Evicted, says that there are two major causes of the eviction crisis: stagnant wages and renters who don’t stand up for each other. These two issues combined are resulting in eviction rates higher than during the Great Depression.
Here’s a closer look at the two causes of the rising eviction rates.
The US Is Experiencing an Eviction Epidemic
In his book Evicted, Desmond begins by saying that evictions in the United States are more common now than they’ve ever been.
We’ll discuss two major causes of this eviction crisis: low wages and the loss of solidarity among renters.
Reason #1: Wages Don’t Match the Cost of Living
Desmond says one major reason evictions are so common now is that income hasn’t kept pace with the cost of living: As rent, utilities, and other necessities have become more expensive, wages have remained stagnant for the US’s poorest people. As a result, low-income earners often struggle to pay their rent.
To highlight this problem, Desmond explains that a standard benchmark for living comfortably is that rent should cost less than a third of a family’s income. By contrast, low-income families might spend anywhere from 50% to 70% of what they earn on housing, leaving very little for food and other essentials.
Furthermore, saving money isn’t possible with such a tight budget. This means that any unexpected or unusual expense—such as an emergency room visit or a car repair—can cause low-income families to fall behind on rent, leading to eviction.
Welfare Benefits Aren’t Enough
Desmond adds that government benefits for low-income families, collectively called welfare, have stagnated just like wages have. As a result, these programs—which are designed to help people live comfortably while unemployed or underemployed—now provide barely enough for people to survive.
The author adds that because welfare benefits are means-tested (only available to people with less than a certain amount of money and assets), those benefits discourage people from saving money even if they’re able to. In other words, someone with low-income work and welfare benefits might actually be able to start saving; however, if at any point they have too much in their bank account, they won’t be able to collect benefits anymore. As a result, they’d soon end up in an even worse financial situation than before.
Reason #2: Lack of Solidarity Among Renters
The second reason Desmond gives for evictions happening so frequently is that renters no longer stand up for each other.
He explains that even during the Great Depression, evictions were relatively rare because renters responded to them with large-scale protests. Renters would organize to protect each other because they had a sense of solidarity toward one another. That solidarity stemmed from feelings of shared ownership in their neighborhoods and homes.
By contrast, Desmond says that many people today—even those in low-income households—consider poverty and eviction to be the rightful consequences of personal failings such as laziness or bad decisions. In other words, people blame individuals (including themselves) for their problems, instead of recognizing the systemic failures that trap people in bad situations.
Along with overlooking the systemic problems keeping them in poverty, many renters now view landlords in a positive light: They’re just grateful to have housing, rather than angry about being exploited by predatory renting practices. We’ll discuss those practices and how they came about in the next section.
The author adds that renter solidarity has also fallen apart because low-income renters are now too busy with their day-to-day problems to fight back against the root causes of those problems. For instance, someone who has to work two or three jobs just to survive probably won’t have the energy to protest for higher wages, even though better pay would allow them to work less and live more comfortably.
