Fast Focus
Fast Focus
Fast Focus is an occasional, electronic-only supplement to Focus on recent poverty research.
Matthew Desmond explores the crisis faced by poor families in finding and maintaining affordable housing in this Fast Focus
brief. Drawing from his own extensive ethnographic and quantitative research, Desmond outlines the trends that led to the current
situation: rising housing costs, stagnant or falling incomes among the poor, and a shortfall of federal housing assistance. As a
result of these trends, most poor renting families now devote over half of their income to housing costs, and eviction has become
commonplace in low-income communities. Poor single mothers with young children, particularly African Americans, are at
especially high risk of eviction. Desmond reviews the consequences of eviction—for parents, children, and neighborhoods—and
concludes with suggested policy remedies and a call to pull housing back to the center of the poverty debate.
