Matthew Desmond Quotes
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I started a student organization that was basically designed to connect students with homeless folks. We visited them and sometimes brought food, but mostly we were there for swapping stories.
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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.
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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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In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves.
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Eviction reveals people's vulnerability and desperation as well as their ingenuity and guts.
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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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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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You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.
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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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Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.
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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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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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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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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.
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American greatness can be further unlocked if opportunity is expanded to all people within its borders.
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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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You do learn how to cope from those who are coping.
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Everywhere else, we are someone else, but at home, we remove our masks.
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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.
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I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty.
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My dad was a preacher.
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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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Kids increase people's risk of eviction.
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Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.