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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Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.
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In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves.
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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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I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.
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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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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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Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nation's racial wealth gap.
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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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You do learn how to cope from those who are coping.
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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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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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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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I'm from a small town, and I thought I would be a lawyer.
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Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.
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Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11% reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31% of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44.7%.
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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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These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.