Matthew Desmond Quotes
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You do learn how to cope from those who are coping.
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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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The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about.
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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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We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.
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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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American greatness can be further unlocked if opportunity is expanded to all people within its borders.
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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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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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Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nation's racial wealth gap.
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There is a deep connection, when we're talking about certain market forces and a legal structure that inhibits low or moderate income families from getting ahead. Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.
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You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.
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Moms that get evicted are depressed and have higher rates of depressive symptoms two years later. That has to affect their interactions with their kids and their sense of happiness. You add all that together, and it's just really obvious to me that eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.
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Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.
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Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.
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You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent.
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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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'Sag Harbor' brought me a new readership - it's a coming of age tale about growing up in the '80s.
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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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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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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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Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.
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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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Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.