One of the most heartbreaking moments in Matthew Desmond’s “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City”— and there’s a shameful assortment to choose from — is when 13-year-old Ruby Hinkston takes refuge in the public library. She’s come to use the computer. It turns out that she’s been slowly building her dream house with a free online game, and she wants to visit it again.
“It had clean, light-reflecting floors,” Mr. Desmond writes, “a bed with sheets and pillowcases, and a desk for doing schoolwork.”
This cheerful vision in pixels forms an almost unbearable contrast to the filth of Ruby’s own apartment. The kitchen sink is stopped up, as is the bathtub and toilet. There are mattresses everywhere, their exposed innards revealing humming burrows of cockroaches — and the mattresses may be the least terrifying of their redoubts. They also fill the kitchen drawers and erupt from the nonworking drains.
Living in extreme poverty in the United States means waging an almost gladiatorial battle for creature comforts that luckier people take for granted. And of all those comforts, perhaps the most important is a stable, dignified home. Yet as a culture, notes Mr. Desmond, we have somehow failed to commit ourselves to providing this most fundamental and obvious necessity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/books/evicted-book-review-matthew-desmond.html