Tuesday, 7 September 2021
Last week saw the most recent meeting of the book club: we read Evicted. Evicted is an ethnography of people who are just a hair away from being homeless — they are spending a huge percentage of their income (often close to 70%) on their monthly rent; as a consequence, they have great difficulty meeting other expenses, as well as meeting their rent for future months, and experience great difficulty as a consequence. Entwined with this is that most of them have a lot of other problems — drug use bing the most common — that exacerbate their circumstances. The author suggests some policy changes — e.g., rental vouchers — that could make things better, but it’s difficult to see changes that will really enable … I want to say ‘these sorts of people,’ which is not right, but it’s something like ‘people who have the range and magnitude of difficulties and dysfunctionalities described in the book; –the people discussed in the book to have good lives. We can make it less bad, but, in my view, that’s about it.