Evicted

This has been on my to-read list for the longest time and I am very glad to finally get around to it. It's a tough book to swallow.

Starting with a quotation from close to the end of the book:

Emphasizing the importance of exploitation does not mean haranguing landlords as greedy or heartless. It means uncovering the ironies and inefficiencies that arise when policy makers try to help poor families without addressing the root causes of their poverty. It means trying to understand the landlords' and tenants' acceptance of extreme inequality - and our own.

This quotation is my main take-away from the book. There is the inherent conflict of interest between landlords and tenants, but exacerbating (this is my fav word to use in reports haha) the problem is all of the structural biases. The deeply ingrained structural, and personal, biases makes me feel really bad. The "bad" containing:

• Shock...at how bad they have it 
• Dissonance...from how they feel 
• Disgust...at how exploitative the system can be
• Incomprehension...of the scarcity mentality
• Anger...at society at large 
• Guilt...at myself for stressing over my own money problems 
• Sympathy...at both the tenants and landlords
• Helplessness...at taking action to improve the system 
• Reluctance...at changing my own views and consequently taking action 

My bag of feelings aside, this book is well written. Both the tenants and landlords have events in which they are taken advantage of, and also events where they take advantage of the other party. Their portrayal is overall very balanced, which adds to my mixed feelings. This is obviously the intent of the author. He describes in the notes (the only book I've read all the notes for) and epilogue how detailed his field work documentations are, how careful his fact checking and overall research procedure is, and how meticulously he chose the appropriate words in the final book.

Speaking of the epilogue, it's like the authors own book report haha. In the epilogue, he actually offers a plausible solution: universal housing vouchers. There's a lot of evidence supporting its effectiveness, as well as a big caveat that implementing this policy will lead to rent increase for the unsubsidized. So this is where the problem becomes personal. In terms of overall utility, this is morally good and I ought to support it despite it being a personal loss of some magnitude. And I believe that if universal housing vouchers are actually implemented, I would support it. But man it does suck that I'll have to pay more rent. And fuck Ford's government for getting rid of rent control for new units in Ontario. He can go fall down multiple flights of stairs.