Matthew Desmond Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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Why young men from the country become firefighters is hard to explain to people who are not from the country. For most of us, it's not about the rush, which fades with time, or the paycheck. We could earn more working for the railroad or a car dealership. I figure it's about the land.
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When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up?
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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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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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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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Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities.
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Evictions cause job loss. Because it's such a destabilizing, stressful event, they lose their footing in the labor market. It has big impacts on people's health, especially mental health.
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Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street.
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I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart.
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I love Milwaukee, the rust belt. It's a very special part of America that's full of promise but also full of pain, where poverty is acute.
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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.
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If we continue to tolerate this level of poverty in our cities, and go along with eviction as commonplace in poor neighborhoods, it's not for a lack of resources. It will be a lack of something else.
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I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.
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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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A lot of the stories about urban America tend to be written on the margins. We focus a lot on these big global cities - New York, San Francisco - or we focus on cities that are having the toughest time - Detroit, Newark, Camden.
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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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The face of America's eviction epidemic is a mom with kids.
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Housing is a social issue: how we live and where we live.
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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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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.