If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. From Harvard sociologist and MacArthur Genius Matthew Desmond, a landmark work of scholarship and reportage. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent-at least when it comes to housing-we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur Genius Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. With Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond ( 2016) has written a landmark book documenting this precarity.

Evicted poverty and profit