Matthew Desmond (b. 1979) is a sociologist with a primary interest in poverty and the author of five nonfiction books about race, class, and employment. His best-known book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), is a study of how evictions of low-income people in the wake of the 2008 financial crash contributed to the former tenants’ poverty. The book follows the housing difficulties of eight households, blending storytelling with public policy analysis to show the immense power of eviction to shape people’s lives. In the book, Desmond advocates for greater federal housing support for low-income people, including vouchers to ensure rent does not exceed 30 percent of income.

In Poverty, by America, his fifth book, Desmond recounts his own personal history of growing up poor in rural Arizona and how those formative experiences led to his interest in the origins of poverty. After his father, who was a pastor, lost his job, Desmond and his family lost their house, and young Desmond questioned how a country could punish the poor with foreclosures and evictions. Later, as Desmond worked his way through college at Arizona State University, he was struck by the contrast he observed between rich and poor and made poverty the focus of his academic work. After graduating in 2002, he pursued his PhD at the University of Wisconsin, studying the housing crisis. During his graduate school years, Desmond moved to Milwaukee, where in 2009, he created the Milwaukee Area Renters Study (MARS), a survey of low-income renters, which shed light on the low-income housing market and the causes and consequences of eviction.

Desmond’s work on housing and eviction led to his receiving a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly referred to as a “genius grant,” in 2015. When Evicted was published in 2016, it received widespread critical acclaim, named as one of the best books of the year by a long list of publications and readers, including The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and President Barack Obama. Among the many awards Desmond received for Evicted are the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Like Evicted, Poverty, By America was a New York Times bestseller and lauded by many critics. From 2012–2017, Desmond served as the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and codirector of the Justice and Poverty Project at Harvard University. He is now the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton, where he founded and directs the Eviction Lab, a team of researchers devoted to collecting data on evictions in the United States and making that data available to policymakers, activists, and others engaged in housing justice and poverty abolition.

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