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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.
Matthew Desmond -
I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.
Matthew Desmond
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Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street.
Matthew Desmond -
Kids increase people's risk of eviction.
Matthew Desmond -
The face of America's eviction epidemic is a mom with kids.
Matthew Desmond -
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 -
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.
Matthew Desmond -
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.
Matthew Desmond
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A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country.
Matthew Desmond -
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.
Matthew Desmond -
I met a landlord who will pay you to move at the end of the week and let you use his van. That's a really nice kind of eviction. I met a landlord who will take your door off. There are 101 ways to move a family out.
Matthew Desmond -
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 -
I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.
Matthew Desmond -
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.
Matthew Desmond
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Without the ability to plant roots and invest in your community or your school - because you're paying 60, 70, 80 percent of your income to rent - and eviction becomes something of an inevitability to you, it denies you certain freedoms.
Matthew Desmond -
The texture and hardship of poverty and eviction is something that I think left the deepest impression on me, and I hope that I try to convey a little bit of that to the reader.
Matthew Desmond -
Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market.
Matthew Desmond -
An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event.
Matthew Desmond -
It is very rare in the life of an intellectual to see your support network show up all at once.
Matthew Desmond -
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.
Matthew Desmond
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Some white Milwakeeans still referred to the North side as 'the cire', as they did in the 1960s, and if they ventured into it, they saw street after street of sagging duplexes, fading murals, twenty-four hour daycares, and corner stores with 'WIC Accepted Here' signs.
Matthew Desmond -
I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart.
Matthew Desmond -
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 -
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.
Matthew Desmond