Friends Assoc. Talks Evictions With Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author

CHESTER COUNTY, PA — A Princeton sociologist who launched an "Eviction Lab" that helped set up an eviction tracking system and a state-by-state COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard will talk with Chester County's Friends Association about the research that looked closely at a decade of housing insecurity.

In Chester County courts, 2,504 landlord-tenant filings resulted in 899 eviction orders in 2019, and in 2020, 1,231 filings brought 377 eviction orders, Friends Association reports. Friends Association is a Chester County non-profit focused on solutions to family homelessness. Every year, hundreds of families in the wealthiest county in Pennsylvania experience the trauma of homelessness.

On May 13 at 7 p.m., Friends Association will host a virtual conversation with Dr. Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author. The event will explore community-based solutions to the current eviction crisis and highlight the extensive work of Desmond and his Eviction Lab.

The community can access the Zoom event here.

Friends said the association's members believe in the power of neighbors coming together to create a more equitable community for all. Friends' innovative programs are focused on four key areas: preventing homelessness, providing emergency shelter, partnering with families to support their stability, and promoting systemic change, explained Emily McClure of the Friends Association.

Chester County in December expanded its Eviction Prevention Court, in a program that provides a combination of legal representation, financial assistance, and social services for individuals or families facing eviction. The result is a planned expansion of the service that was piloted in September 2020 in conjunction with the Downingtown Magisterial District Court.

Eviction Prevention Court (EPC) services became available in January 2021 to residents, served by two additional district courts that cover the City of Coatesville, the Borough of South Coatesville, and Valley Township. Read the full story here.

The Friends Association is bringing Desmond, a noted author and researcher, to discuss the issue of eviction. MacArthur Genius and a Princeton sociologist, Desmond is the author of The New York Times bestseller and 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner, "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City." The book also won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by nearly three dozen outlets including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Praised as “an extraordinary feat of reporting and ethnography” by The Washington Post, "Evicted" transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a uniquely American problem, McClure said.

Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology and launched the Eviction Lab at Princeton University after conversations with renters and policymakers convinced him that collecting national data on eviction would help answer fundamental questions about residential instability, forced moves, and poverty in America.

In 2018, The Eviction Lab published the first-ever national dataset of evictions in America, collecting millions of data points going back to 2000. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic devastation it brought to millions, the Eviction Lab has developed a series of resources to understand local responses to the increased insecurity for many of American’s renting families, including a state-by-state COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard and an Eviction Tracking System.

A New York Times Magazine contributing writer, Desmond is also the author of On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters; Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America (with Mustafa Emirbayer); and The Racial Order (also with Mustafa Emirbayer). In 2018, he received the Stowe Prize for Writing to Advance Social Justice, awarded by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center to authors whose work shines a light on critical social issues.

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