Matthew Desmond Quotes
-
When I was confronted with just the bare facts of poverty and inequality in America, it always disturbed and confused me.
-
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.
-
You meet folks who are funny and really smart and persistent and loving that are confronting this thing we call poverty, which is just a shorthand for this way of life that holds you underwater. And you just wonder what our country would be if we allowed these people to flourish and reach their full potential.
-
In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves.
-
Eviction reveals people's vulnerability and desperation as well as their ingenuity and guts.
-
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.
-
I felt that writing about peoples' lives was a heck of a responsibility, and I wanted to know them in a deep way.
-
Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.
-
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.
-
Most cities don't have a just cause eviction law. Most allow no cause evictions, as well as evictions for nonpayment.
-
You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.
-
I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.
-
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.
-
Since evictions go through court, it has a record that comes with it, and many landlords that I spend time with use that as a big screening mechanism. And that's really the reason, we think, families are pushed into worse housing and worse neighborhoods after their evictions.
-
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.
-
American greatness can be further unlocked if opportunity is expanded to all people within its borders.
-
Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.
-
Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health, not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.
-
Ours was not always a nation of homeowners; the New Deal fashioned it so, particularly through the G.I. Bill of Rights.
-
Everywhere else, we are someone else, but at home, we remove our masks.