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An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event.
Matthew Desmond
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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.
Matthew Desmond
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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.
Matthew Desmond
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Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.
Matthew Desmond
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Kids increase people's risk of eviction.
Matthew Desmond
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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%.
Matthew Desmond
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Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.
Matthew Desmond
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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.
Matthew Desmond
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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.
Matthew Desmond
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My dad was a preacher.
Matthew Desmond
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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.
Matthew Desmond
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If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling.
Matthew Desmond
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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.
Matthew Desmond
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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.
Matthew Desmond
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African American women, and moms in particular, are evicted at disproportionately high rates.
Matthew Desmond
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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.
Matthew Desmond
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I'm from a small town, and I thought I would be a lawyer.
Matthew Desmond
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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.
Matthew Desmond
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Between 2009 and 2011, more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were displaced involuntarily, whether by formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation.
Matthew Desmond
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It takes a good amount of time and money to establish a home. Eviction can erase all that.
Matthew Desmond
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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.'
Matthew Desmond
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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.
Matthew Desmond
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You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.
Matthew Desmond
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If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions.
Matthew Desmond
