Matthew Desmond Quotes
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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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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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When you fight fires for a few seasons, you know what to expect. Your heart doesn't race as much as it did.
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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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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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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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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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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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Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.
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Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.
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Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.
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African American women, and moms in particular, are evicted at disproportionately high rates.
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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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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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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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We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.
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My dad was a preacher.
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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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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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You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.
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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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The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about.