Research on Matthew Desmond
Matthew Desmond is a Princeton sociologist and has been
personally affected by poverty, the main focus of this book. Growing up, he
recalls the gas being shut off sometimes and meals being cooked on a
wood-burning stove instead. He had little money like his mother before him, for
whom this was an improvement. When he got to college, his classmates’ and
teachers’ perceptions of wealth shocked him. The concept of the American dream
baffled him, and the concept of it being accessible to all was even more
shocking. He worked to observe not only the root of poverty, but the people who
lived in it. This story is real. Everyone in the book was personally interviewed
by Desmond. He lived in Tobin’s trailer park and a house owned by Sherrena and
Quentin. He paid them, too. The names shave all been changed to protect their
identities, but these are all real people who Desmond now knows personally. He
followed them across the country for interviews, slept in their homes, went to
church with them, and watched their children. He actually talked to over a
hundred people who were not featured in the book. After his time in Milwaukee,
he formed the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, a survey for tenants in Milwaukee
to get more accurate statistics on poverty and eviction. It ran from 2009 to
2011 and interviewed about 1,100 tenants. He has written 3 other books and
several essays with focuses on race and social theory, educational inequality,
dangerous work, the inner-city housing market, and political ideology. He was
awarded the MacArthur “Genius” grant in 2015.
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