“Without stable shelter, everything else falls apart,” writes Matthew Desmond in his book Evicted. Throughout the book Desmond shows how eviction, and sometimes just the threat of eviction, has the power to ruin people’s lives. People who are living in poverty and just barely holding on can be pushed over the edge by an eviction, and can find it impossible to get their lives back on track. Far from being a consequence of poor decision-making and poverty, eviction can often drive people to make poor decisions, cause people to lose jobs, and can drive people into grinding and inescapable poverty.
“The pursuit of happiness undeniable includes the pursuit of material well-being,” Desmond writes, “minimally, being able to secure basic necessities.” People who have faced eviction don’t have the ability to secure basic necessities, they are excluded from the pursuit of happiness that Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Homeless shelters limit people’s ability to own items and bring them into a shelter. Storage facilities, where people may hope to keep things safe during an eviction, often become a black hole from which people’s possessions never return. Eviction leaves people with only the things they can carry with them, or perhaps with the things they can stuff in a car.
When people lose basic necessities they are effectively shut out of society. Sure, someone doesn’t need a TV, doesn’t need 5 pairs of shoes, and doesn’t need a coffee maker (that last one is arguable), but people do need things to brush their hair and teeth, enough changes of clothes to keep garments clean, and other basic necessities to avoid being shunned in public. We need small comforts from time to time to enjoy some aspect of life and feel human. We need connections, and that means we need some basic level of material possessions and a way to keep them out of the elements. Eviction takes these things away from people and makes lives fall apart. Housing needs to be a basic right, it needs to be something we make sure people have, otherwise we can never expect people to live the stable and responsible lives we want for them.
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