Matthew Desmond Quotes
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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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The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about.
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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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You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.
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Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.
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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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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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You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent.
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My dad was a preacher.
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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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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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Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.
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Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.
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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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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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It takes a good amount of time and money to establish a home. Eviction can erase all that.
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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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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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Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.
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An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event.
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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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When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.
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'Sag Harbor' brought me a new readership - it's a coming of age tale about growing up in the '80s.