American sociologist, Princeton professor, and the principal contemporary chronicler of eviction and poverty in the United States; author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and reshaped the policy conversation on housing, and of Poverty, by America (2023), which is a shorter, more polemical argument about why American poverty persists at rates untouched by fifty years of social-scientific measurement.
Desmond was born in 1979 in Winslow, Arizona, grew up in small-town northern Arizona in a family that lost its home to foreclosure during his adolescence, and took his BA at Arizona State and his doctorate at Wisconsin. Evicted grew out of fifteen months of field research in Milwaukee in 2008–2009, during which Desmond lived first in a trailer park on the city's mostly white south side and then in a rooming house on the predominantly Black north side, following eight families and two landlords through the eviction process in granular detail. The book's methodological argument is that eviction, previously treated as a downstream consequence of poverty, is one of its causes: the loss of a home cascades into job loss, family separation, children's school disruption, and mental illness, and low-income women — particularly Black women — are evicted at rates that make eviction a gendered analog of incarceration. Evicted set off a wave of state and municipal right-to-counsel and just-cause-eviction laws; Desmond's follow-on Eviction Lab at Princeton (founded 2017) produced the first national eviction dataset.
Poverty, by America (2023) is a shorter, 200-page polemic. Its argument is that the persistence of American poverty is a matter not of ignorance but of interests: American poverty is subsidized (by cheap labor; by tax expenditures that flow disproportionately to the non-poor such as the mortgage-interest deduction; by opportunity hoarding in affluent school districts and neighborhoods) by comfortable Americans who benefit from it. The book has been criticized for compressing evidence that Evicted laid out with care, and admired for making a case that a long-form ethnography could only imply.
Desmond's position in American sociology is somewhere between Elijah Anderson's close urban ethnography and the large-N quantitative tradition; he combines extended participant observation with administrative-data work. He is the contemporary inheritor of the tradition that runs from Jane Addams through Michael Harrington and Barbara Ehrenreich, and his work is part of the same intellectual territory as Bryan Stevenson's on the carceral state and Michelle Alexander's on the policing-industrial complex.