Metropolitics

Visible Minorities, Visible Risk: Toronto's Unequal Eviction Burden

Prentiss Dantzler & Khalil Martin & Abigail Meza — 2025-09-16T05:00:00Z

In Toronto, who gets evicted isn't random—it follows the city's racial and economic divides. Canada's data practices hide crucial details about who is most at risk.
Evictions are a leading cause of housing insecurity in cities worldwide, disproportionately affecting lower-income households and non-white racialized groups. In Canada, although attention to evictions is growing, there is limited research available. As the most populous city in the country, Toronto is home to a diverse set of

- Essays / evictions, social class, poverty, housing, tenants, rental, rental housing, minorities, precarity, Canada, Toronto

(Re)Constructing Inequality: Community Development in Public and Private

Claire Dunning — 2021-12-14T06:00:00Z

Claire Dunning reviews Jeremy R. Levine's new book, Constructing Community, an ethnographic study of community development projects in Boston.
For a book about urban poverty and redevelopment, Constructing Community recounts few protests or headline-grabbing incidents. Instead, the drama unfolds slowly over the course of a decade in poorly lit community rooms, downtown board rooms, and the backseats of cars. This is a book about the banalities of bureaucracy and governance—a fact that author

- Reviews / Boston, Massachusetts, United States, mass transit, rapid transit, transport, public transportation, community-based organizations, urban poverty, redevelopment, poverty, governance, local governance, urban governance, ethnography

Understanding Why Homeless People Refuse Emergency Accommodation

Édouard Gardella & translated by Oliver Waine — 2021-03-09T06:00:00Z

The refusal of emergency accommodation by many homeless people expresses the intensity of their attachment to the communities to which they belong. While this attachment to the street or to their neighborhood exposes them to extreme precarity, it also reflects a need among homeless people for recognition and a certain rootedness.
If people sleep on the streets, it is because they have chosen to do so. This is what Sylvain Maillard, a French member of parliament from the ruling LREM party,

- From the Field / exclusion, homelessness, precarity, emergency accommodation, poverty

Poverty as a Social Stigma

Axelle Brodiez-Dolino & translated by Oliver Waine — 2019-12-13T06:00:00Z

The distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor is deeply entrenched, and representations of poverty have long been burdened with their share of prejudices and stigmas. Historian Axelle Brodiez-Dolino brings into perspective the changing social boundaries, categories and policies that have constructed, deconstructed and sought to tackle poverty.
Society—whether Christian or secularized, monarchical or republican—has always been, and remains, the product of interaction among

- Essays / urban poor, poverty, precarity, vulnerability, assistance, welfare state, stigma

Open-Air Auto Shops: Subsistence Jobs in Working-Class Neighborhoods

Collectif Rosa Bonheur & translated by Oliver Waine — 2019-10-25T04:00:00Z

The informal activities of street mechanics observed by Collectif Rosa Bonheur in northern France attest to a much larger subsistence economy at the margins of employment. According to this research collective, the spatial anchoring of these activities, on the borderline of informality, invites us to consider spaces that are often perceived as peripheral and relegated as “working-class centralities.”
In the vicinity of houses, in garages adjacent to dwellings, on sidewalks, in public squares

- From the Field / cars, poverty, precarity, Roubaix, Lille, Hauts-de-France, Northern France, France, working classes, working-class neighborhoods, informality, work, jobs, employment, Nord–Pas-de-Calais

Insecure Lives Under Extreme Climate Conditions: Insights from a Fishing Hamlet in Tamil Nadu, India

Devendraraj Madhanagopal — 2018-04-17T05:00:00Z

In recent years, climate change–induced weather events have exacerbated poverty and insecurity in small fishing villages on the southeastern coastline of India. Author Devendraraj Madhanagopal documents the difficult choices that vulnerable fishermen must make between safety and livelihood, and urges action.
---- Series: Climate Change and Social Change Rainwater and seawater surrounded the whole village, and we were disconnected from the external world for a few days.
[15 March 2016,

- From the Field / safety, poverty, India, climate change, vulnerability, insecurity, precarity, Tamil Nadu, fishing, social change

Snowbirds' Gift Economy in the Arizona Desert

David Frati — 2017-11-07T06:00:00Z

Each year, 200,000 retired people spend the winter in and around the small town of Quartzsite, Arizona, in the Sonoran desert. Some 50,000 of them live in informal housing: campers, tents, cars and trucks, and self-constructed cabins. In the field with the most economically marginal of these “desert snowbirds,” David Frati observes the complex gift economy that structures their social lives.
Every winter, retired snowbirds reach the small town of Quartzsite, Arizona, one of the few places in

- From the Field / camps, care, housing, alternative housing, United States, ethnography, sociabilities, poverty, assistance, informal housing, Arizona, money, resourcefulness, desert, gift economy, nomadism, retirement, snowbirds, concern for others, neighborliness

Evictions and Poverty

Hilary Botein — 2016-06-28T05:00:00Z

Matthew Desmond's Evicted has drawn much-needed attention to the under-studied problem of unsubsidized rental housing, where most poor households in the United States live. Hilary Botein describes how the book's ethnographic approach gives us an understanding of motivations and forces that keep this housing overpriced and in terrible condition.
I have had two jobs that taught me about the world. In college, I worked as a waitress in a fancy Philadelphia restaurant. The size of my tips

- Reviews / housing, United States, ethnography, poverty, evictions, Milwaukee

On Being Black and Poor in a Small City

Peter Moskos — 2016-05-24T06:00:00Z

No Way Out, Waverly Duck's recent examination of how African Americans in an impoverished small city construct a social order, joins a long tradition of poverty research in sociology. In this review, sociologist Peter Moskos discusses why this book deserves to stand out in a crowded field.
No Way Out, by sociologist Waverly Duck, is the story of a neighborhood: a poor neighborhood, a black neighborhood, a neighborhood with public drug dealing, and also a stable neighborhood.
Somewhere

- Reviews / drugs, ethnography, poverty, race, drug dealing, small cities

When Cities Fail, Babies Die

Monica J. Casper — 2016-02-02T06:00:00Z

Detroit, Michigan is often identified as the worst city in the United States, with excessive poverty, racism, and social disorder. The city also faces high infant and maternal mortality rates. Monica Casper explores interconnections among these issues.
Motor City
Detroit, Michigan, has been in the news in recent years as a city in horrific decline, a post-apocalyptic hub of industrial collapse, white flight, acute poverty, and municipal malfeasance. Once the nation's economic engine with

- Essays / racism, Rust Belt, United States, poverty, race, Detroit, neoliberalism, biopolitics, necropolitics, infant mortality, Make Your Day, maternal mortality, urban decay, ruin porn