This year's One Book, One U selection is Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

The One Book, One U program selects a book for each Spring semester to provide a shared educational experience in our university community.  Find information on upcoming events as well as research resources, dicussion guides, and more!

Please fill out the online form to request a copy of the book:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScE1zmNqaM_s4csSooS4GT-ynGBe0SENW6VtuZd_RjbWmmjmA/viewform
  You can also scan the QR code below:

Find more resources on the Community and Civic Engagement Research Guide!

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If you are a member of the UM community, use the links below to get access to the ebook and audio book:

• OverDrive audiobook
• OverDrive ebook

If you are a member of the South Florida community, check your local library to find a copy of the ebook available for check out.

We are still planning events for Spring 2022.  Please check back for updates.  Find the full list of events on the One Book, One U website.  If you are planning an event related to Evicted, please feel free to let us know about here: https://forms.gle/FSdhXfJXoH5NJrcL6

 

Evicted: A View from Miami   Join HOPE Fellows and leading advocates, Jeffrey Hearne from Legal Services of Greater Miami and Zaina Alsous from the Miami Workers Center, for a conversation about the housing and eviction crisis facing our community. The speakers will discuss Miami’s longstanding housing challenges, the current state of the crisis and share advocacy strategies to protect those most affected. Wednesday, October 20th  12:30 PM  Via Zoom  Jeffrey M. Hearne is the Director of Litigation at Legal Services of Greater Miami, Inc., where he oversees and provides a strategic focus to significant litigation across all practice areas. Jeff has dedicated much of his 20-year career at LSGMI to preventing evictions and enforcing tenants’ rights. He is also the Director of the Tenants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Miami School of Law and is a former co-chair of the Florida Housing Umbrella Group, the statewide association of tenant advocates. Zaina Alsous is the Organizing and Advocacy Manager at the Miami Workers Center, a membership-based organization that seeks to build power among low-wage care workers and tenants in Miami.   This program is in conjunction with the One Book, One U program at the University of Miami     Register Now

Prof. Matthew Desmond will be speaking on February 15, 2022 at 7 pm!  Details are forthcoming!

Please find links to scholarship produced by UM faculty, staff, and students on homelessness, eviction, and related topics.  (If you would like your scholarship featured here, please email abrillat@miami.edu.  We'd love to bring awareness to your work!)

• Petty Offenses Symposium Law Review: Featuring Eric Tars from the National Homelessness Law Center, and Tamar Ezer, Melanie Ng, David Stuzin, and Conor Arevalo from the University of Miami School of Law.  This entire issue is valuable for discussions of homelessness in the United States.
• No Rachmones: The dynamics of Florida's pay-to-play eviction litigation: Recommended reading from the HOPE Miami Law Evicted webinar.
• Orlando Sentinel 'Locked Out' special report:  Read the full report through UML:
  • Part 1: Low pay, soaring rents, pro-landloard laws set up Florida renters for eviction once COVID hit
  • Part 2: As pandemic worsens Florida eviction crisis, more Black renters see their lives upended
  • Part 3: Not even COVID could end Florida leaders' long record of snubbing pro-renter bills

The UM Libraries Special Collections houses a number of collections that are directly related to housing and eviction.  Take a look at the guides below to find oral histories, papers, and more!

• Max Rameau Papers Finding Aid: https://atom.library.miami.edu/asm0084  You can also find a series of oral histories with Max Rameau available here: https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/asm0085/id/149/rec/24
• Race Housing and Displacement Oral History Collection: https://umiami.mediaspace.kaltura.com/category/Library%3EUniversity+of+Miami+Special+Collections%3ERace+Housing+and+Displacement+Oral+History+Collection/183048531
• Scott Carver Housing Oral History Collection: https://umiami.mediaspace.kaltura.com/category/Library%3EUniversity+of+Miami+Special+Collections%3EScott+Carver+Housing+History+Collection/149429641
• Erica Dawn Lyle Papers Finding Aid: https://atom.library.miami.edu/asm0449
• Power U Center for Social Change Records Finding Aid: https://atom.library.miami.edu/asm0154

• Data & Visualization Services at UML
  The Data & Visualization Services department of the University of Miami Libraries promotes data literacy on all campuses through education, consultation, and curation. We provide equitable expert advice on the components of the research process (discover, planning, collection, preparation, analysis, publication, and long-term management).
• UM Libraries' GIS Services
  
• UM Special Collections
  
• Manuscript & Archival Collections from UM Special Collections
  

• ProQuest Research Library
  ProQuest Research Library provides in-depth coverage of the top 150 core academic subject, including 5,060 titles -over 3,600 in full text- from 1971 forward. It features a highly-respected, diversified mix of scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, and newspapers.
• PsycINFO
  Abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations, in behavioral science and mental health. Citations and summaries date back to early 1800s; journal coverage from 1887 to present. From the American Psychological Association.
• Sociological Abstracts
  Sociological Abstracts indexes and abstracts research literature published worldwide in journals and other serial publications. Social Planning/Policy Development (SOPODA) is included as a subfile, providing additional literature on policy issues addressing violence, abuse, housing, the environment and other social issues.
• Nexis Uni
  Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an intuitive interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
• ABI/INFORM Global
  Business, Finance, Economics: journals, company profiles, Wall Street Journal. Coverage of business research topics, business and economic conditions, management techniques, theory, and practice of business, advertising, marketing, economics, human resources, finance, taxation, computers. Also, contains business and executive profiles.
• ERIC (ProQuest)
  ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) is the largest education database in the world -- containing over 1.5 million records of journal articles, research reports, curriculum and teaching guides, conference papers, dissertations and theses, and books. Established in 1966, ERIC is supported by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement and is administered by the U.S. National Library of Education (NLE). Currently over 650,000 records are from scholarly journals, more than 225,000 records are from reports, conference proceedings, and the like, and reference works in excess of 14,000 records.  Many of these records contain links to the ERIC full-text documents, but the user can also access full-text from the publisher when available or use the library's linked full-text resources when available.

Are you interested in including the 2021-2022 One Book, One U common reading selection, Matthew Desmond's Evicted in your teaching?  Join us for a facilitated reading group to discuss how to teach Evicted, for UM facult, staff, and graduate students.  Organized by the Office of Institutional Culture, Learning Innovation and Faculty Engagement team, and UM Libraries, this initiative allows interested instructors to explore how to incorporate the text into their classrooms.
 
Please register for one session only.  Each session will cover the same material, and use the same facilitating prompts.
 

Wednesday, October 27, 2021 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm Via Zoom Registration link

Friday, October 29, 2021 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm Via Zoom Registration link

Our guest faculty facilitator will be Robin Bachin, Associate Professor and Assistant Provost for Civic and Community Engagement.
 

Curious about Evicted?  Check-out the guides below for more information!

• Common Reading Guide (pdf)
• Study Guide with Chapter Summaries
• Chapter Guide with possible themes

Using the Chapter Summaries document, select a chapter that relates to your class or group and host a discussion session.  As a starting point, you can use the questions below, adapted from the American Library Association Book Discussion Group online guide.

Questions to Discuss

1. What does Desmond do to criticize the American housing system?  What does the author wish to reform or change?
2. Does the book offer a central idea or premise?  What are the issues being raised?
3. Do the issues raised by Desmond affect your life?  How so?  Directly, on a daily basis, or more generally?
4. What evidence does Desmond provid to support the central ideas of the book?  What sources does he use, and how does he use them?
5. Is the evidence Desmond provides convincing?  Is it relevant or logical?  Does it come from authoritative sources?  Is Desmond an authority?  If so, how?
6. Does Desmond make any unsupported claims?  What are they, and what evidence would be needed to support them?
7. What kind of language does Desmond use?  How does his writing help or undercut his premise?
8. What implications does Desmond draw for the future?  What are the short-term and long term consequences to the issues being raised in the book?
9. What solutions does Desmond offer?  Who would implement those soluctuions?  How probable is success?
10. How does Desmond make a call to action to the readers?
11. Are the issues raised by Desmond controversial?  If so, how?  What are the different sides of the controversy?
12. What specific passages of the book or chapter struck you personally- as interesting, profound, incomprehensible, illuminating, etc?
13. What did you learn from reading the book?  Did it broaden your perspective?

Want more ideas and activities?  Reach out to the Learning Innovation & Faculty Engagement team at Academic Technologies!  Contact them at life@miami.edu.  Find more information on the Academic Technologies website.

The questions below are included in Evicted on page 418 of the paperback edition.

1. Have you ever been evicted or do you know anyone who has? If the answer is yes, what was your/their experience like, and how has it affected your/their life?

2. What was your experience reading Evicted? Were you surprised by what you learned? Was any particular scene or character’s story emotionally painful for you to witness?

3. Many people have very codified perceptions of “people who get evicted” and suspect that those people are largely responsible—through bad decision making—for their circumstances. Did you feel this way before reading Evicted? Why or why not? Did your opinions change after reading the book? If so, how?

4. In Evicted, author Matthew Desmond takes a narrative approach to an important topic and follows the stories of several real people. Which person’s story were you most drawn to and why?

5. Sherrena Tarver claimed to have found her calling as an inner-city entrepreneur, stating, “The ’hood is good. There’s a lot of money there” (page 152). How did Sherrena profit from being a landlord in poor communities? Do you think her profits were justified? What responsibilities do landlords have when renting their property? What risks do they take? Do you sympathize with Sherrena or not? 

6. On Larraine and her late boyfriend Glen’s anniversary, she spends her monthly allocation of food stamps on “two lobster tails, shrimp, king crab legs, salad, and lemon meringue pie” (page 218). Can you relate to her decision? How might you have judged her differently without knowing the backstory that Desmond provides? 

7. Because they have children, Arleen, Vanetta, and Pam and Ned frequently find themselves shut out of available housing and resort to lies in order to secure a place to live. Are these lies justified? If you have children, how far would you go to shelter your family? 

8. Although eviction is the central issue in Evicted, affordable housing interacts intimately with many other social issues. For example: Do parents who have trouble finding/providing safe housing for their children deserve to have their children taken away and put in foster care? Would affordable housing make it easier for addicts and recovering addicts (such as Scott) to enroll in programs that increase chances of rehabilitation? What other major issues can you think of that eviction affects, whether in this book or in the world in general? 

9. How does race factor into the types of struggles faced by the individuals profiled in Evicted? What about being a woman? Or a single parent?

10. Did reading Evicted inspire you to want to help others in positions similar to those of the people in the book? If so, how do you think you might get involved? (Hint: Visit JustShelter.org to learn more about groups and organizations in your local area who are already fighting the good fight!)

11. Why do you think Crystal made the decision to let Arleen and her sons stay until they found another residence? How did tenants such as Crystal and Arleen rely on friends and extended kin networks to get by? Did this do anything to lift them out of poverty or distress? What limitations do these short-term relationships have? Why do you think agencies such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children seek to limit kin dependence?

12. Landlords repeatedly turned down Pam and Ned’s rental applications because they have children. Why? Do you think families with children should have any protection when seeking housing? Why do you think families with children were not considered a protected class when Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968? Do you think it is fair for landlords to charge tenants with children monthly surcharges and children-damage deposits? Why or why not? 

13. Why did Doreen choose not to call Sherrena when the house was in desperate need of repair? Do you agree that “The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house” (page 256)? What effects does living in a home that is not decent or functional have on a person’s psychological and emotional health? 

14. Do you think housing should be a right in America? 

15. Many Americans still believe that the typical low-income family lives in public housing. Unfortunately, the opposite is true; only 1 in 4 families who qualify for any kind of housing assistance receive it. In Evicted, Desmond proposes a universal housing voucher program. What do you think of that idea? 

16. The government spends much more money on homeowner tax benefits for affluent families than on housing assistance to poor families. Is this situation justified? How would you address this issue? 
 

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