Matthew Desmond Quotes
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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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Kids increase people's risk of eviction.
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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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Arguably, the families most at need of housing assistance are systematically denied it because they're stamped with an eviction record. Moms and kids are bearing the brunt of those consequences.
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An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event.
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Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.
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Since evictions go through court, it has a record that comes with it, and many landlords that I spend time with use that as a big screening mechanism. And that's really the reason, we think, families are pushed into worse housing and worse neighborhoods after their evictions.
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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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When we think of entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare immediately come to mind. But by any fair standard, the holy trinity of United States social policy should also include the mortgage-interest deduction - an enormous benefit that has also become politically untouchable.
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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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African American women, and moms in particular, are evicted at disproportionately high rates.
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Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.
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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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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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When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from 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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Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.
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My dad was a preacher.
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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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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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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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The standard of 'affordable' housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family's income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent.
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I'm from a small town, and I thought I would be a lawyer.