Desmond's call for a sociology of housing that reaches beyond a narrow focus on policy and public housing, a sociology of displacement and inequality that includes a serious study of exploitation and extractive markets is right up there in revolutionary importance and insight with Talal Asad's calls for an anthropology of the secular. This book is not just a call though but a full on leap into the project that Desmond started in Milwaukee. He makes a pretty damn perfect case for Milwaukee renters representing wider international societal problems. Not just statistical sociology with extensive citations of studies, court records, government data, scholarly papers etc. though there is plenty of that, but also an ethnography of a place and of people, friends, families, neighbors.