Matthew Desmond’s Evicted is my favorite non-fiction book of 2016 so far. It tells multiple stories, from a close-up perspective, of the devastating effects that losing a home can have on a person’s life. Books like this, I think, are so important – not only for their policy prescriptions but for the way they make us pause and think about what it is like to be something we, perhaps, are not.

In Evicted, Matthew Desmond tells the stories of a group of poor Milwaukee residents who, at one point or another (or, more often, at multiple points) find themselves being evicted from their homes. Desmond followed his subjects for years to tell their stories, taking notes and recording conversations, and as a result the reader gets a front-row seat to the havoc that eviction wreaks on their lives. He follows, as well, the landlords responsible for the evictions, providing personal insights into their own motivations and challenges. Over the course of the book, we come to see the various causes of eviction – not all of them necessarily driven by non-payment of rent – and we see how being thrown out of your home even once can open the door to an inescapable pattern of housing instability and poverty.

We learn, too, how well-intentioned government laws and policies can make things worse. For example, tenants who turn to the city when landlords refuse to make critical repairs may find their homes deemed unsuitable for habitation, winding up on the streets.  As a result, many tenants choose to live in dangerous conditions rather than take the risk of attempting to have them fixed and losing everything. Even more gallingly, Milwaukee and many other cities have laws that make landlords responsible for 911 calls to their properties. In Milwaukee, if the police are called to a property three times in a given month, the owner must come up with a plan to “abate” the “nuisance” or else face fines or even jail time. Most often, the “plan” the landlord comes up with is to evict the tenants. These rules were originally put in place to prevent landlords from allowing their properties to become drug dens. In practice, however, Desmond shows us that domestic violence victims have to choose between enduring abuse or calling 911 and possibly losing their homes.

That is obviously a choice no one should ever have to make. No one should ever have to suffer domestic abuse in silence. Furthermore, no one should ever have to be placed unnecessarily at risk of losing their home. Because, as Desmond shows us, eviction is an incredibly destructive force in lives that are often already at risk. Few legitimate landlords will rent to a tenant who has a recent eviction. This apparently innocuous standard has the effect of driving the recently-evicted to landlords who are willing to take a risk on such tenants, often because they themselves are not always operating within the law: slumlords, for lack of a more academically appropriate term. These people tend to own multiple properties all in the same geographic location, meaning the poor and disadvantaged are essentially forced into the same neighborhoods, creating or reinforcing the existence of ghettoes and other forgotten areas of the city. This may force such tenants away from their families, away from their support networks, and place them at greater risk of being evicted again, continuing the cycle.

I’m describing this book in terms of the things I learned from it, but believe me when  I say that the stories it tells are personal and compelling and they really deserve more than to be understood as a series of lessons about poverty and eviction. Desmond is an incredibly talented writer and he writes movingly about his subjects. We watch as they scramble to find money for rent, as they beg their landlords for more time, as they open the door for the marshals and watch the movers dump all their possessions onto the curb. As a reader, I remember the details of the problems because I remember the details of the stories. Evicted got through to me in a way no graph or policy memo ever could.

Too often, the poor, to people who are not poor, are just some incomprehensible mass of “other,” and because we cannot relate to them we don’t spend much time worrying about their problems. While I was reading this book, I mentioned it to a friend, relating some of the book’s anecdotes about how being evicted from their homes affected the various Milwaukee residents (Milwaukeans?) who are the subjects of this book. My friend listened to me and said, “That sounds like it sucks, but, you know, on the other hand, maybe they should have paid their rent.”

I want to stress that this friend is not someone who lacks empathy. He’s just someone who, like many of us, is permitted by the circumstances of his birth to avoid spending a lot of time in thought about social problems that have never touched his life. Because Desmond spent so much time with these families, he is able not just to tell us their stories but to make us feel them, in the way a talented novelist makes readers empathize with her protagonists. I’ll be loaning this book to my friend.

In the end, Desmond does propose a solution (a nationwide housing voucher program). I don’t know whether his solution is a practical idea, or whether it would work, and so I won’t claim to review it here. But the service this book offers is not in the solution it proposes: it’s in the gripping, compelling, memorable, personal way that it describes the problem that must be solved. You will come away from Evicted unable to forget what you have seen.