年初在亚特兰大，我和梅琳达认识了一位年轻女性，我叫她莎伦（非真名）。莎伦每天工作12小时，每周工作七天。她是位单亲妈妈，带着两个儿子，其中一个刚出生没多久。在生完小儿子的住院期间，她仅此一次没来得及支付公寓租金，可回到家时发现自己已被驱逐。我们见面的时候，莎伦仍在与驱逐做抗争，正从一个法律援助小组获得帮助。但很明显，她深陷困境。听她讲述自己和孩子们的遭遇，我们感到十分心痛。

与莎伦的这次会面，让我之前一直在思考的某个问题有了真人实例。就在我们见面的几天前，我刚刚读完《被驱逐者：美国城市中的贫穷与利益》这本书，作者是普林斯顿大学社会学家马修•德斯蒙德（Matthew Desmond），同时也是我们基金会的受资助人。我可以理解为什么德斯蒙德能凭借这本书得到麦克阿瑟基金会的“天才”奖金，并因为此书获得普利策奖。书中的调查表明，莎伦经历的这类事情并不是什么特例。每年都会有成千上万甚至上百万美国人被驱逐出自己的家。在德斯蒙德做报告的密尔沃基，每两年就有八分之一租房者被迫搬家。

尽管这些数字极具震撼力，但《被驱逐者》首要关注的是人，而不是数据。德斯蒙德精妙地刻画出了生活在贫困中的美国人。我自己并没有经历过莎伦或《被驱逐者》书中人物所面临的那种困境，因此只能通过他们的故事来了解。比起其他任何我读过的作品，这本书使我更清楚地理解在美国当穷人是一种怎样的感受。

为了了解当地居民并记录他们的生活，德斯蒙德用了18个月时间在密尔沃基两个最为贫困的社区生活——其中一个社区以白人居多，另一个大部分是黑人。书里讲到的既有房东也有租客，德斯蒙德不带丝毫评判地把他们全都写了出来。他只是帮你去理解他们为什么会做出那些决定。因此，虽然他们生活中的细节和我自己的经历全然不同，但在德斯蒙德的笔下却很容易让我产生共鸣。

正如书名所呈现的，《被驱逐者》讲述的是生活极端贫困的人要想找到并保住一个家有多难。很多专家都认为，花在住房上的费用不超过收入的30%是比较理想的情况；根据德斯蒙德的调查，大部分贫困家庭花在住房上的费用都超过了50%，很多人甚至超过了70%。

如果你只是为了能有住处容身就要付出这么多，那么一旦遇到意外就很难有余力再应对了，一次意外事故就能把你压垮。书里讲到一个名叫阿琳的女人，只是因为一次与孩子打雪仗有关的很小争执，有人就破门而入把她赶出了公寓。还有一次，她在帮忙支付了一位好友的葬礼费用之后，实在没有办法按时缴纳房租。

不过对我来说，《被驱逐者》这本书最大的贡献并不是它对住房问题的关注，而是它非常生动地说明了那些关于贫穷的问题是如何错综复杂地交织在一起。有人因为要寻找到新住处所以不得不旷工，而这又让他们的收入减少并且更容易被炒鱿鱼。所有这些不安定状态都对孩子产生了很坏的影响。阿琳的一个儿子竟然在一年内上过五所不同的学校。

我还稍稍了解到，如果有人把你的家当全部堆在路边，而你却不知道家人们今天晚上可以睡在哪里时，那种感觉有多痛苦。难怪那些有过被驱逐经历的人患上抑郁症和焦虑症的机率明显更高。

正如德斯蒙德所写：“被驱逐的后果很严重。失去住房会让你的家人进到庇护所、废弃的房子甚至大街上。它会引发抑郁、病痛，迫使家人搬到不安全社区的破房子里，迫使你离开原来生活的社区，还会给孩子造成伤害。被驱逐会暴露出人们的脆弱和绝望，同时也可以展现他们的勇气和智慧。”

我和梅琳达花了一些时间了解美国人是如何攀登经济台阶的（专家称之为“脱贫”，mobility from poverty）。《被驱逐者》这本书让我看到了这个庞大问题的冰山一角，也让我想要了解更多会让人们住不起房子的系统性原因，还有旨在改善这个问题的各种政府项目。

德斯蒙德在书中简短回顾了公共住房的历史。政府主持的这类大型项目基本上都已经成为历史，现在大部分穷困人口都住在私人住宅里。不过他还写道，由于经费无法满足需求，只有四分之一符合房租补助资格的家庭能够真正拿到补贴。申请住房补贴要等的时间往往不是以几个月几年来计算，而是几十年。

（如果你想阅读更多关于这些问题如何严重影响了非洲裔美国人——以及种族隔离政策在其中扮演的角色——我强烈推荐你阅读理查德·罗斯坦（Richard Rothstein）的《法律的色彩》。联邦政策对种族隔离住房模式的产生发挥了巨大的作用，对此我感到非常震惊。）

《被驱逐者》这本书提出了一个很重要的问题，却没有给出答案：为什么低收入社区有廉价的房地产和空置房屋，却仍然缺少人们负担得起的像样住房？如德斯蒙德所述，密尔沃基几个最贫困地区内两室公寓的平均房租仅比全市均价低50美元。但对于造成这种现象的原因，他并没有做出更多解释，比如分区限制和严格的建筑法规也许会抬高哪怕是普通住房的房租。

公平地说，我们对这个问题还有太多不了解的地方。有关这个课题还没有足够的数据支持。因此德斯蒙德已经着手打算去了解更多。在我们基金会的支持下，他正在计算美国各个城市被驱逐人口的比例。他正在深入研究这种市场失衡现象，以便弄清楚为什么即使在低收入社区，房价还会如此居高不下（在读到《被驱逐者》之前很久，我们就开始资助这项工作了）。

我很期待德斯蒙德的研究成果。同时，任何人如果想要更好地理解美国的贫困问题，《被驱逐者》绝对值得一读。这本书文笔优美、引人深思、令人难忘。

A searing portrait of American poverty

A searing portrait of American poverty In Atlanta earlier this year, Melinda and I met a young woman I’ll call Sharon. (That’s not her real name.) Sharon works 12 hours a day, seven days a week. She is a single mom with two sons, including a newborn. While Sharon was in the hospital after the birth of her new son, she missed a single rent payment on her apartment. She came home to discover that she had been evicted. When we met, Sharon was still fighting the eviction and getting help from a legal aid group. But it was clear she was in crisis. It broke our hearts to hear what she and her boys were going through. 

Meeting Sharon put a face and name on an issue I had been thinking about a lot. Just a few days before we met, I finished reading Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton University and a grantee of our foundation. I can see why Desmond received one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants and won a Pulitzer for his book. His research shows that experiences like Sharon’s are not some aberration. Hundreds of thousands—and maybe millions—of Americans are evicted from their homes every year. In Milwaukee, where Desmond did his reporting, one in eight renters were forced to move in a two-year period. 

As stunning as those numbers are, Evicted is primarily about people, not data. Desmond has written a brilliant portrait of Americans living in poverty. I have no personal experience with the kind of crisis faced by Sharon or the people profiled in Evicted, so I can only learn about it by hearing their stories. This book gave me a better sense of what it is like to be very poor in this country than anything else I have read. 

Desmond spent 18 months living in two high-poverty neighborhoods in Milwaukee—one mostly white, the other mostly black—getting to know the residents and documenting their lives. You meet both landlords and renters, and he portrays them all without being the least bit judgmental. He just helps you understand why they make the choices they make. Although the specifics of their lives are unlike anything I have experienced, Desmond makes it easy to empathize with them. 

True to its title, much of Evicted is about how hard it is to find and keep a home when you live in deep poverty. Most experts agree that the ideal is to spend no more than 30 percent of your income on housing; according to Desmond’s research, most poor families have to spend over 50 percent on housing, and for many it’s over 70 percent. 

When you’re paying so much to keep a roof over your head, there’s no room for bad luck. A single bad incident can send you reeling. One woman in the book, Arleen, gets evicted from her apartment after someone breaks down her front door over a minor dispute involving kids throwing snowballs. Another time, she falls irreparably behind on the rent after helping to pay for the funeral of a close friend. 

For me, though, Evicted’s biggest contribution isn’t the focus on housing. It’s the dramatic illustration of the ways in which issues of poverty are intertwined. When someone has to search for a new place to live, they miss work, which cuts back on their pay and makes them more likely to get fired. And all this instability has a terrible impact on children. One of Arleen’s sons attends five different schools in a single year. 

I also got a glimpse of how gut-wrenching it must be when someone piles up your belongings on the curb and you don’t know where your family is going to sleep that night. It’s no wonder that people who have been evicted experience significantly higher rates of depression and anxiety. 

As Desmond puts it: “Eviction’s fallout is severe. Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street. It invites depression and illness, compels families to move into degrading housing in dangerous neighborhoods, uproots communities, and harms children. Eviction reveals people’s vulnerability and desperation, as well as their ingenuity and guts.” 

Melinda and I have been working for some time to learn more about how Americans move up the economic ladder (what experts call mobility from poverty). Evicted helped me understand one piece of that very complex question, and it made me want to learn more about the systemic problems that make housing unaffordable, as well as the various government programs designed to help. 

Desmond briefly goes over the history of public housing. Big government-run projects are largely a thing of the past, and today most poor people live in private housing. But because funding hasn’t kept up with the need, he writes, only about a quarter of families that qualify for help paying their rent actually get any. The wait list for a housing voucher is often measured not in months or even years, but in decades. 

(If you’re interested in reading more about how these problems disproportionately affect African-Americans—and in the role that legal segregation has played—I strongly recommended reading The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein. I was stunned by the huge role that federal policy has played in creating segregated housing patterns.) 

Evicted raises one big question that it doesn’t really answer: How can low-income neighborhoods have cheap real estate and vacant houses, but still lack decent affordable homes? As Desmond notes, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee’s highest-poverty areas was only $50 less than the citywide median. But he doesn’t say a lot about what causes this, for example how restrictive zoning and strict building codes may drive up the cost of even a modest house. 

To be fair, there’s a lot that we simply don’t know about this question. There isn’t good data on this subject. So Desmond has set out to learn more. With support from our foundation, he is calculating eviction rates for every city in the country. He is looking deeper into these market failures to understand why housing prices stay so high even in low-income neighborhoods. (We funded this work long before I read Evicted.) 

I am eager to see what Desmond’s research discovers. In the meantime, Evicted is well worth reading for anyone who wants to better understand poverty in America. It is beautifully written, thought-provoking, and unforgettable.

推荐阅读：【盖茨书单】我在2017年读过的5本好书