Matthew Desmond Quotes
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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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Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.
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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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You do learn how to cope from those who are coping.
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You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.
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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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We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.
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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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Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.
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The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about.
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You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent.
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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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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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Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nation's racial wealth gap.
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Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.
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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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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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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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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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I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.
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If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma.
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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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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.