When Harvard sociology professor and 2015 MacArthur award-winner Matthew Desmond was growing up, money was tight. “Sometimes the gas got shut off and Mom cooked dinner on top of our wood-burning stove,” he writes in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. “She knew how to make do.”
Still, when the family could no longer keep the creditors at bay, the bank foreclosed on Desmond’s childhood home. By that time, he was at Arizona State University on scholarship and recalls feeling simultaneously sad and embarrassed by his family’s predicament.
But Desmond did not wallow in grief for long. Shortly after the foreclosure, he began volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, building houses for people without them. He also began spending time with homeless people. “The people I met living on the street were young and old, funny, genuine, and troubled,” he writes in Evicted. “When I graduated I felt a need to understand poverty in America, which I saw as a wellspring of so many miseries.”
[For more of this story, written by Eleanor J. Bader, go to http://www.alternet.org/econom...ricas-poverty-crisis]
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