Book of the Year

Credit Slips readers are invited to share the best credit/finance book of this year. The book can be a monograph, fiction, textbook, anything. It doesn't have to be published this year; just that you found it this year.

My nomination is Evicted by Matthew Desmond. It's an ethnography of evictions in Milwaukee and compellingly describes the problems of financial distress. The book describes how tenants struggle to make rent, and the strategies used by landlords, with the help of the courts and sheriff's department, to collect if they cannot. The site for the book contains amazing photographs-- check it out.

While the book focuses on evictions for nonpayment of rent, the foreclosure crisis also wreaked havoc on millions of lower-income Americans who may never own a home. When the property owner was foreclosed upon, the tenants found themselves on the street. The scarce and uneven protections available led to the enactment of the Protecting Tenant at Foreclosure Act. That law expired two years ago, leaving at-will tenants in about half of states vulnerable to eviction immediately after foreclosure.

Evicted describes the heartache that comes with home loss: the strain on family relationships, the mental anguish, the physical illness, and other harms. These problems are all too familiar to those who study consumer bankruptcy, but Desmond's work is a powerful story of financial distress that ensnares families who cannot make ends meet.