Forest Book Club Resource Guide: A Robin Hood-inspired Roadmap to Reading Matthew Desmond’s Evicted

A toolkit to guide conversation about New York City’s housing crisis. 

In partnership with Strand Book Store, the Forest launched our Book Club Event Series last month with a conversation between Robin Hood CEO Wes Moore and Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted, on the decades-old racial divide in the New York City housing crisis. 

Matthew Desmond reminded us that “evictions are not just a symptom of poverty, but also a driver of poverty.” Rising rents, stagnant wages, and discriminatory policies and practices have created a housing crisis that pre-dates the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2016, for example, Desmond’s team saw 3.7 million eviction filings, or seven eviction filings per minute, when unemployment was under five percent. Now, the current public health and economic crisis is deepening already profound social inequalities and may dramatically increase rates of eviction and homelessness in America.

Evictions are a permanent blemish on an individual’s record that make it harder to get approved for an apartment or even public housing. This, in turn, makes it more difficult to find housing, creates further instability, and exacerbates existing problems with employment, health, mental health, debt, and more. Matthew Desmond summed it up when explaining, “eviction is loss. Loss of not just a house but loss of connection, school, community, happiness, and security.”

Because eviction precipitates a vicious cycle where families tend to live in worse and worse housing and low-income families are left with no safety net, we must act. To take action, let’s first learn. We created the Evicted Forest Resource Guide just for you to dig into the key terms, recent policies, and next steps that break down this big problem into the basics. 

We hope you find our toolkit helpful whether you plan to host your own book club or simply to begin a conversation with friends. We hope it allows you to discover how, with your help, Robin Hood invests in programs that fight eviction, provide emergency shelter and mental/physical health services, as well as permanent and affordable housing.