The Violence of Eviction

Markets are not natural but created, and this is especially true of housing. It takes the violent disruption of expulsion for this to become clear. The notion that housing is naturally like any other market has not only informed the way we think about the houses we rent and the mortgages we can take, it’s led us to believe that the city itself wields a kind of economic instrumentalism in how it sorts those who inhabit it. Mike Konczal reviews two newly published volumes examining the stories of the foreclosed and the evicted, those most vulnerable to the violence of the housing market, ultimately, advancing our understanding of how housing really works—how it fails us as a society, and how we can do better.