Event Host: Department of Sociology
Short Description: Professor Matthew Desmond, Harvard University, explores the crisis faced by poor families in finding and maintaining affordable housing.
Matthew Desmond is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard University. He is a recipient of the 2015 MacArthur Fellows Award. This prestigious and highly selective award, often referred to as a “genius grant,” is given to scholars who show extraordinary originality and exceptional creativity in their work. The Fellowship is a five-year grant that provides Professor Desmond the opportunity to pursue his intellectual and professional interests in the absence of specific obligations or reporting requirements.
In this lecture Desmond, explores the crisis faced by poor families in finding and maintaining affordable housing. Owing to rising housing costs, stagnant or falling incomes among the poor and a shortfall of federal housing assistance, most poor renting families today devote over half of their income to housing costs, and eviction has become commonplace in low-income communities. Poor single mothers with young children, particularly African Americans, are at especially high risk of displacement. Desmond will review the prevalence and consequences of eviction— for parents, children and neighborhoods.