Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, By America, takes a hard look at prevalence of poverty in the richest country in the history of the world. As a writer on inequality and a pastor who works alongside low-income individuals and families, I enthusiastically recommend the book.
You might not agree with all of what Desmond writes about poverty in America—its causes, its persistence and proliferation, and his proposals for eradicating it. Not reading Desmond’s work, however, is akin to putting one’s head in the sand. His voice is one of the most prominent in the current debate on poverty in this country.
Desmond is a Princeton University sociologist and urban ethnographer. Although he previously taught at Harvard, he’s not a blue blood. At the turn of the century, he went to college with his parents’ encouragement but not their financial backing. While Desmond was in college, his working-class parents (his dad was a bi-vocational pastor) were not able to keep up with mortgage payments and a bank foreclosed on their home in Winslow, Arizona— the home in which Desmond grew up. It became a defining moment in his educational and vocational journey.
Desmond went on to graduate school in Madison at the University of Wisconsin. He figured studying sociology would give him the best chance to better understand, on a larger scale, the poverty his family knew personally. Ever since the Gilded Age helped make John D. Rockefeller the world’s first billionaire, the debate about poverty in America has been spirited. Left-leaners blame poverty on structural forces (discrimination, for example) and right-leaners focus on individual deficiencies.
Desmond argues for a comprehensive look at poverty that includes the voices of those living in it. “The poor were being left out of the inequality debate, as if we believed the livelihoods of the rich and the middle class were entwined but those of the poor and everyone else were not.”
The above quote comes from Desmond’s previous book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. As part of his research for Evicted, Desmond lived parts of two years in a trailer park and a low-income neighborhood in Milwaukee. This choice lent his research and subsequent writing a greater sense of validity and authority.
Desmond has critics—some of these pundits cashing paychecks from orgs and thinktanks on the far-right end of the political spectrum—who continue to sell the simplistic notion that poverty is primarily self-induced. The poor are lazy, hooked on government largesse, and/or are properly paying for their own foolish decisions and mistakes. Certainly, some living in poverty fit these categorical descriptions. But not all poor folks—especially the children living in poverty in this great nation—can be thus accused. Desmond notes that Germany, Canada, and South Korea have half the rate of children living in poverty than the US.
That the poor are solely responsible for their status is a convenient theory held by many, the aforementioned pundits included, who live in the well-to-do camp and, as a consequence, have zero interactions with those who are poor. As Desmond’s above quote alludes to, it’s best that those weighing in on the plight of the poor—especially pundits and politicians—actually have conversations and interactions with them.
Desmond leads the work of “Eviction Lab” at Princeton University. His team of researchers and students gather data on evictions throughout the country, with the mission of exposing the link between housing insecurity and poverty.
A crucial topic covered in Desmond’s new book, based on the research of Eviction Lab, is the symbiotic relationship between “private opulence and public squalor”—a reality alive and well in the US as much as it ever has been.
“As people accumulate more money, they become less dependent upon public goods and, in turn, less interested in supporting them. If they get their way, through tax breaks and other means, personal fortunes grow while public goods are allowed to deteriorate. As public housing, public education, and public transportation become poorer, they become increasingly, then almost exclusively, used only by the poor themselves” (pgs. 105–106).
The increasing income and economic segregations that exist in the US today, Desmond writes, is upheld by our political and personal choices. He calls the mortgage interest deduction a public housing policy benefit mostly for the rich; the stagnation of low wages he deems exploitation of the working poor; and, exclusionary zoning policies (i.e., prohibiting multi-family housing or smaller, affordable houses in high-income neighborhoods) he calls a polite and quiet way of promoting segregation.
Toward the end of the book, Desmond writes that “poverty abolition is a personal and political project” (p. 183). Austin City Lutherans’ ministry efforts—our food pantry, rent assistance programs, and furniture and household items provision for those transitioning from the streets to housing—will continue to be led by biblical mandates: “Love your neighbor,” “Bear one another’s burdens,” and “Care for orphans and widows in their distress.” As director of our ministries, I’ll make sure our organization is also paying attention to the words and works of Matthew Desmond, a prominent leader for positive change in the fight against the injustice of poverty.