A recent NYT article by Jennifer Schuessler reports about Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond’s upcoming book Evicted: Poverty and Property in the American City that will be published next week:

The sociologist William Julius Wilson called Mr. Desmond’s research, which combines ethnographic observation with reams of hard-won data, “one of the most comprehensive field studies of the past half-century” and a call to action on par with Michael Harrington’s “The Other America.”

“It’s an eye-opener, even to poverty researchers,” Mr. Wilson said in an interview. “We knew evictions were a problem, but not on the scale that Matt demonstrates.”

“Evicted,” which closely follows eight families and their landlords, both black and white, mostly keeps the data to the endnotes. Written with the vividness of a novel, it offers a dark mirror of middle-class America’s obsession with real estate, laying bare the workings of the low end of the market, where evictions have become just another part of an often lucrative business model.

The topic of Desmond’s book and his approach relates to our course’s focus on ethnographic methods as well as his focus on a specific location, Milwaukee, WI. A look at Desmond’s faculty page reveals his research interests in inequality’s intersection with issues such as education, race, and policing in low-income areas.