Matthew Desmond Quotes
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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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Ours was not always a nation of homeowners; the New Deal fashioned it so, particularly through the G.I. Bill of Rights.
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An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event.
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My dad was a preacher.
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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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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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You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.
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Between 2009 and 2011, more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were displaced involuntarily, whether by formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation.
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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.
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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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In February 1932, the 'Times' published an account of community resistance to the eviction of three families in the Bronx, observing, 'Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000.'
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If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling.
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The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about.
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African American women, and moms in particular, are evicted at disproportionately high rates.
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Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today.
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If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions.
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It takes a good amount of time and money to establish a home. Eviction can erase all that.
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You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.
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I teach at Harvard, and focusing on understanding this problem on a national level is a big priority of mine right now - where evictions are going up and down, what cities are actually instituting policies that work, what housing insecurity is doing to our cities, neighbourhoods, our kids.
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Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.
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Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.
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Most poor families are living completely unassisted in a private rental market, devoting most of their income to housing. When you meet people who are spending 70, 80 percent of their income on rent, eviction becomes much more of an inevitability than the result of personal irresponsibility.
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Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.
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You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent.