Elari’s Reviews > Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City > Status Update

In fixating almost exclusively on what poor people and their communities lack—good jobs, a strong safety net, role models—we have neglected the critical ways that exploitation contributes to the persistence of poverty. We have overlooked a fact that landlords never have: there is a lot of money to be made off the poor. The ’hood is good.

A group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a “significant precursor of suicide.” None of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. “Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.”