Culture
How 'Evicted' Became an Exhibit
The National Building Museum brings Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book—and the American housing crisis itself—to life.
To write his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on evictions, Matthew Desmond did his homework: The Princeton sociologist spent two years living in two of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods—one a largely white trailer park, one a mostly black rooming house—embedding with the families he chronicled and following their lives as they suffered the hazards of unsafe housing and the psychological distress that flows from eviction.
To build out its exhibit on Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., spent $586 on particleboard at Home Depot. The show, which opened over the weekend, features house-shaped frames on which curators have plastered photos, infographics, and quotes from Desmond’s book.