Matthew Desmond Quotes
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All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes.
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The face of America's eviction epidemic is a mom with kids.
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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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If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions.
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There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.
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I don't think we can fix poverty without fixing housing, and I don't think we can address housing without understanding landlords.
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Libraries are not just places where people go read a book, but places where an immigrant goes to take English lessons and where folks out of a job search for community.
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Child Protection Services can get all up in your business if you have kids. Just strictly from a business standpoint, kids are a liability to landlords, and they actually provoke evictions.
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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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Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations.
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Kids increase people's risk of eviction.
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No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.
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I have always been really troubled by the amount of poverty in America. Americans are matched in their rich democracy with the depth and expanse of poverty. That's really always unsettled me.
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My dad was a preacher.
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When you ask people why they were evicted, the big reason is nonpayment of rent. They can't afford to keep a roof over their heads. Utilities are a big part of the story too, while the third leg on the table is the lack of government help with housing.
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This was what a lot of us, mainly young men, did in the summers in northern Arizona. This is how I put myself through college. I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school.
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It is very rare in the life of an intellectual to see your support network show up all at once.
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Do we believe housing is a right and that affordable housing is part of what it should mean to be an American? I say yes.
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Everywhere else, we are someone else, but at home, we remove our masks.
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A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country.
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I want my work to influence public conversation, to turn heads, and to bear witness to this problem that's raging in our cities. If journalism helps me with that, I'll draw on journalism... and I'm not going to worry too much if academics get troubled over that distinction.
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Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street.
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If you look at the American Household Survey, the last time we did that in 2013, renters in over 2.8 million homes thought they would be evicted soon.
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When I left Milwaukee, and I had all these stories. I felt so responsible for people. It's a heck of a thing to do, to try to write someone's story.