Evicted by Matthew Desmond is a great book on this issue. It is infuriating some of the predatory, senseless, ruthless, scumbag business practices that slum lords use and crazy to discover that this is a recent development starting from the 60s.
Also shout out to Justfix.nyc, a startup using tech to tackle this issue. One of their projects is this website they made to help.
Word of advice to anyone who picks it up. Read the final chapter or two first. It's where he gets into the weeds of the data and such. If you start at the beginning and get bored, get distracted, give up, etc. before the end you're going to miss the best part.
Don't get me wrong, the stories are great. But just the same it gets disheartening, if not depressing.
I can certainly understand how you might find it disheartening and depressing, but I don't know I could quite see bored. The retelling of the situations was captivating, and the descriptions of how the system fails those most in need was harrowing at times. I've been recommending it to anyone who will listen.
However, the truth is, plenty of books get started and are never finished. Since the bit at the end was so factually important to the discussion of the issue, I didn't want that to be missed.
Imho, he should have started there.
(Obviously this is entirely a personal perspective.)
Few enjoy such books. But more need to be more aware of the (data) truths that define the issue.
The real value of that book is in the stories and descriptions of the inner workings of how evictions work in the two cities he profiles, which it does an excellent job telling throughout the rest of the book, and because of that I would highly recommend it.
It’s not clear what would be better. Should landlords always evict at the first missed check? That seems even more cruel. Or never? That has a certain appeal as a revolutionary-socialist redistribution of all apartments to their current occupants, but also means no more rental market going forward, or least higher prices on honest payers to cover the risk of deadbeats.
My takeaway from Evicted was that rents are too high and wages are too low, and regulation is a hopelessly ineffective way to paper over those structural problems.
There was a story later in the book about a slum lord's property that burned down because she cheaped out on fire detectors. Her tenant lost her baby but the slum lord walked away with even more money from insurance to buy 3 more properties.
The same slum lord took advantage of government housing incentives too by renting her dilapidated apartments at artificially higher rents to those lucky enough to be in a government program. Not to even mention how most of the tenants that are evicted can't even afford to literally get to the court house for the hearing.