Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Desmond's Pulitzer Prize-winning ethnography of eight Milwaukee families facing eviction transformed understanding of how housing instability perpetuates poverty. His argument, that eviction causes poverty rather than merely reflecting it, became central to housing policy debates. Narrative journalism at its most rigorous.
Desmond writes himself out of the book entirely, narrating scenes he witnessed in a third person that reads like omniscience, and the seams show once you notice. The misery accumulates without pause for three hundred pages; the actual argument and the voucher proposal are compressed into an epilogue. You finish knowing eight families intimately and the policy fight hardly at all.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
