Seeing Today’s Homelessness Crisis Through Evicted ------------Poverty, Forced Moves, and the Housing‑Profit Machine in 2025 America

 By Tony Tong

1. Why go back to Matthew Desmond's Evicted?

      When sociologist Matthew Desmond immersed himself in Milwaukee between 2008–2010, he discovered a painful driving force behind U.S. poverty: landlords reap oversized gains by leasing the most substandard housing to the lowest-income families and then displacing them through speedy evictions. The book, released in 2016, contended that eviction is both a result and a driver of entrenched poverty—wrecking credit, employment, health, and social connections all at the same time. Nine years subsequent to their presentation, those arguments appear to resemble less an exposé and more a manual designed for comprehending a national emergency.

2. The scale of the emergency in 2024‑25

1. Record homelessness. HUD's January 2024 Point‑in‑Time count counted over 770,000 individuals who were homeless on one night—an 18 percent increase from 2023 and the highest total since tracking began in the modern era in 2007.  https://www.hudexchange.info/news/hud-releases-2024-ahar-report/
2. Growing more rapidly than the population. Federal Reserve economists will determine that the homelessness rate increased from 1.75 per 1,000 individuals in 2022 to 2.3 in 2024—a 30 percent rise in two years.    https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/who-is-homeless-in-the-united-states-a-2025-update
3. Outdoor survival is now the reality. For the first time, more than half of homeless people are sleeping outdoors or in vehicles, with the highest unsheltered percentages recorded on the West Coast.

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahar/2024-ahar-part-1-pit-estimates-of-homelessness-in-the-us.html

Fig 1.“Line chart showing U.S. Point‑in‑Time homelessness rising from ~550 k in 2017 to 770 k in 2024.”

These statistics underpin Desmond's basic warning: without cheap housing and real tenant protections, displacement quickly spirals out of control, driving families out of risky apartments into automobiles, tents, and onto the sidewalk.

3. Eviction: the "poverty pump" in real‑time data

Desmond has referred to eviction as "the missing piece of the poverty puzzle." The Eviction Lab's 2024 tracking system is currently recording an eviction filing rate of 7.8 percent in the cities that it monitors—nearly eight cases per hundred renter households.

https://evictionlab.org/ets-report-2024/

Fig 2.“Bar chart of eviction‑filing rates climbing back above pre‑pandemic levels, reaching 7.8 % in 2024.”

Every application initiates the same process Desmond witnessed in Milwaukee:

1. Credit wrecked → landlords demand higher deposits or refuse to rent → families resort to substandard units or couch‑surfing.
2. Job stability lost → court dates, compulsory moves, and increased commutes cut into earnings.
3. Deterioration in safety and health → stress, anxiety, drug use, and exposure to violence rise.

The outcome is not a short-term setback but a structural funnel into chronic homelessness.

4. Structural Accelerators: Increases in Rentals and Policy Failures

Severe rent burden. From 2021 to 2024, the share of renter households that paid more than 50 percent of income on rent rose by approximately 12 percent nationally, with no or little margin remaining to cover a doctor's visit or missed work hours.

• Shrinking safety net. Pandemic‑era eviction moratoria and emergency rental assistance expired by late 2022, creating a “policy cliff” that coincided with rising rents.

• Inadequate public housing. While nearly 37,000 permanent supportive housing units were added in 2023, the net gain was eclipsed by the 118,000‑person increase in homelessness. 

• Desmond's observation that "exploitation arises from scarcity" is forcefully on point; scarcity enables landlords to get more for less and to swiftly evict tenants who fall behind on payments.

5. New flashpoint: criminalizing tent encampments

The policy reaction in most cities has moved from prevention to controlling visibility. Thirteen months following the Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, permitting cities to ban sleeping outdoors, over 150 cities have enacted "sit-lie" or camping bans.

https://www.ctinsider.com/opinion/article/criminalization-homelessness-ct-housing-20355669.php

In May of 2025, California released a model ordinance that would ban people from camping in the same public location for more than three consecutive days, fining or arresting them if they fail to comply. Its proponents have argued the law unleashes sidewalks; detractors see it as "poverty made illegal," a parody of Desmond's description of eviction courts that punish the vulnerable without engaging with underlying market pressures.

6. Evicted lessons for 2025 solutions

 1.Shift from emergency to prevention.

• Provide universal right-to-counsel in eviction court and require pre-filing mediation; cities that have done this have cut formal evictions by up to 40 percent.
• Create an automatic rent‑aid stabilizer that increases vouchers when local rents or unemployment increase—effectively the housing equivalent of unemployment insurance.

2.Housing First, with integrated health.

•  Merge permanent supportive housing with addiction and mental‑health treatment rather than dealing with shelter, detox, and housing as separate silos. Each dollar invested is proven to save $1.50 in ambulance and jail costs.

3.Data transparency and tenant voice.

• Nationalize the Eviction Lab model: require real-time reporting of eviction filings, rent increases, and vacancy rates.
• Involve tenants in policy-making, from zoning commissions to rent boards, to undo the information imbalance Desmond documented.

7. Final Reflection

Evicted concludes by calling for us to "recognize housing as a basic human need." The 2024–25 numbers indicate we're headed in the opposite direction. If eviction is a poverty accelerator, then eviction prevention is an anti-poverty policy. Addressing tents and recreation vehicles as the issue only addresses the above-ground symptom; to break the cycle of poverty and profit, we must address the ease—and profitability—of sending families into the streets. Desmond has given us the tool of analysis; our task now is political will.

Ready to turn insight into action? Click here to volunteer or donate via the National Alliance to End Homelessness—your single click is a small but powerful mind‑change toward ending homelessness.