Milwaukee’s North Side rose up last month, following the police killing of Sylville Smith. State officials like Democratic Wisconsin county sheriff David Clarke blamed the riots on “black cultural dysfunction” while Donald Trump called for “more cops on the street,” ignoring the fact that police violence provoked the riot in the first place. But as Matthew Desmond makes clear in his book Evicted, the police are but one part of a complex landscape of inequality in Milwaukee.

In Evicted Desmond uses the lens of real estate to bring the struggles of Milwaukeeans to life. Drawing on years of ethnographic research in some of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods — including both the predominantly black ghetto on the North Side and a mostly white trailer park south of the Menomonee River — he shows how chronically unaffordable, inadequate, and insecure housing produces myriad social ills, running the gamut from unemployment to malnutrition, from psychological trauma to substance abuse, from failing schools to conflicts with police. “Without stable shelter,” he writes, “everything else falls apart.”

Desmond blends rich dialogue, vivid descriptions, and intimate character portraits with extensive statistical evidence, underscoring the national scope of the housing crisis. As working-class incomes stagnate and housing costs soar, millions of Americans now spend most of their income on rent, sometimes leaving only a few dollars a day for other expenses.