Matthew Desmond Quotes
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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 that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.
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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.
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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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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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I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.
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Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.
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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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Public-sector union organisers have told me about how firefighters, police officers, and nurses can no longer afford to live in the cities they serve and protect.
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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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Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street.
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I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn't only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, 'Shoot, eviction does that.'
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All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes.
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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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The face of America's eviction epidemic is a mom with kids.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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The cost of evictions varies a lot, but it could be for landlords an expensive process as well. Among the costs for landlords as well is the emotional costs of an eviction.
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Housing is a social issue: how we live and where we live.
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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.