Matthew Desmond Quotes
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Eviction reveals people's vulnerability and desperation as well as their ingenuity and guts.
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I had come to college believing in a story that if you worked hard, the American dream was reachable.
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You have to understand the role the landlords are playing in shaping neighborhoods, how they potentially expand or reduce inequality, how their profits are a direct result of some tenant's poverty.
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If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.
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In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves.
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Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.
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I felt that writing about peoples' lives was a heck of a responsibility, and I wanted to know them in a deep way.
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Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nation's racial wealth gap.
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Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques - from overdraft fees to student loans subsidizing for-profit colleges - specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor. This problem generally goes unrecognized by policy makers.
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I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.
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When you fight fires for a few seasons, you know what to expect. Your heart doesn't race as much as it did.
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The poor don't want some small life. They don't want to game the system. They want to contribute, and they want to thrive. But poverty reduces people born for better things.
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American greatness can be further unlocked if opportunity is expanded to all people within its borders.
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If I wrote in Jacob Riis' time, I'd be writing about teeming slums in our cities and kids dying of tuberculosis or outhouses in Philadelphia or kids losing their toes because they were living in homes without heat. He took on a battle in 'The Battle with the Slums' - and we won.
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You do learn how to cope from those who are coping.
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Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.
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There were evictions that I saw that I know I'll never forget. In one case, the sheriff and the movers came up on a house full of children. The mom had passed away, and the children had just gone on living there. And the sheriff executed the eviction order - moved the kids' stuff out on the street on a cold, rainy day.
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Families who get evicted tend to live in worse housing than they did before, and they live in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and higher crime rates than they did before.
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It's true that eviction affects the young and the old, the sick and the able-bodied. It affects white folks and black folks and Hispanic folks and immigrants. If you spend time in housing court, you see a really diverse array of folks there.
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Most cities don't have a just cause eviction law. Most allow no cause evictions, as well as evictions for nonpayment.
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Everywhere else, we are someone else, but at home, we remove our masks.
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I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this. I understand that poverty is never just poverty. It's often this collection of maladies, this compounded adversity. I'm not naive about the problem. But I think that stable, steady housing is one of the surest footholds we could have on the road to financial stability.
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Even growing up the way I did, I was shocked by the level of poverty I saw as a college student. I thought the best way to understand it was to get close to it on the ground level.
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I'm from a small town, and I thought I would be a lawyer.