“Love don’t pay the bills,” opines landlord Sherrena Tarver as she prepares to remove another black woman from one of her north Milwaukee properties. When has it ever in America? It’s expensive being poor, and perhaps triply expensive to be black, female, and poor. Although black women make up 9 percent of Milwaukee’s population, they account for 30 percent of evictions in the city, which had a housing crisis even before the Great Recession. One in eight renters experienced a “forced move” during the height of the recession, and one in five black women in Milwaukee will face an eviction sometime in their lives.

A shattering account of life on the American fringe, Matthew Desmond’s Evicted shows the reality of a housing crisis that few among the political or media elite ever think much about, let alone address. It takes us to the center of what would be seen as an emergency of significant proportions if the poor had any legitimate political agency in American life. More than 20 percent of Americans spend over half their income each week on rent, a number that continues to rise, recession or not. For many of the individuals Desmond profiles—including a heroin-addicted ex-nurse who can’t get into an underfunded county rehabilitation program, and a trailer-park property manager whose job hangs in the balance after local politicians target his park as a site of prostitution and drug running—there is little hope of breaking out of the cycle of unstable housing.

EVICTED: POVERTY AND PROFIT IN THE AMERICAN CITY by Matthew Desmond Crown, 432 pp., $28

Desmond introduces us to Patrice Hinkston and her three children as they face eviction from a ramshackle building that Tarver, a black working-class striver with “bobbed hair and fresh nails,” owns in the north Milwaukee ghetto. Patrice is given an eviction notice as she pushes the wheelchair of her neighbor, a Vietnam veteran named Lamar, along the street. Soon, he too receives an eviction notice for nonpayment of rent. Lamar tries to work his debt off by painting and improving the apartment Tarver has evicted Patrice from. He is cheap but costs more than hiring “hypes,” the droves of out-of-work men in the community, some homeless, who will labor for well below minimum wage.

After her eviction, Patrice moves her family into another of Tarver’s buildings on the same lot, an apartment where her mother and siblings already live. The result is eight people crowded into a derelict two-bedroom apartment with a broken sink, bathtub, and “barely working” toilet. Withholding rent does not compel Tarver to make repairs—she claims the Hinkstons broke the facilities—and calling a building inspector can be perilous. Tenant protections largely disappear for families who are behind on their rent, as Patrice’s mother was before her daughter and her family moved in. She, too, is eventually taken to eviction court, riding the bus through snowy Milwaukee at Christmastime to appear. The city used to place a moratorium on evictions over Christmas, but no longer.

Tarver’s neglect of her properties comes off as cruel, but Desmond avoids painting her as a villain. She has been hardened by doing her desperate tenants favors, he informs us, giving them food and clothing when they have none, providing when the state can’t or won’t. This goodwill, in Tarver’s eyes, has been returned with late rent payments or broken appliances. After being lenient with a tenant who is ultimately involved in a shooting in one of her apartments, Tarver and her partner clean the blood out of the rug. Calls to law enforcement to settle a domestic-violence dispute end with the police threatening Tarver with fines and recommending she evict the victim of the reported abuse.