Matthew Desmond Will Change the Way You Relate to America's Poverty Crisis

Desmond's new book 'Evicted' takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge.

By Eleanor J. Bader / AlterNet

When Harvard sociology professor and 2015 MacArthur award-winner Matthew Desmond was growing up, money was tight. “Sometimes the gas got shut off and Mom cooked dinner on top of our wood-burning stove,” he writes in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. “She knew how to make do.”

Still, when the family could no longer keep the creditors at bay, the bank foreclosed on Desmond’s childhood home. By that time, he was at Arizona State University on scholarship and recalls feeling simultaneously sad and embarrassed by his family’s predicament.