Matthew Desmond Quotes
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You do learn how to cope from those who are coping.
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I saw people get fired after their eviction. But when I found that if you get evicted, your chances of losing your job increase by 20 percent, that's when it really hit home for me.
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You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.
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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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Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.
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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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You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent.
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If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.
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We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.
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A lot of people didn't know just what eviction does to people, how it really sets their life on a different and much more difficult path, acting not like a condition of poverty but a cause of it.
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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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Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nation's racial wealth gap.
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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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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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'Sag Harbor' brought me a new readership - it's a coming of age tale about growing up in the '80s.
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I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.
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I think there are ways that graduate students can fact-check their work. I think there are ways that we can do this that don't require massive amounts of resources.
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If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma.
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Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.
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Since the publication of 'Evicted', I have had countless conversations with concerned families across America. Teachers in under-served communities have told me about high classroom turnover rates, which hinder students' ability to reach their full potential.
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When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up?
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I think I've read all of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is a lot. He started off with comprehensive field work in Philadelphia, publishing a book in 1899 called 'The Philadelphia Negro'. It was this wonderful combination of clear statistical data and ethnographic data.
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You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.