Matthew Desmond Quotes
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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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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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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 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.
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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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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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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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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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A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country.
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There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.
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I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.
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Eviction is much more an inevitability than a result of irresponsibility.
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Hundreds of data-mining companies sell landlords tenant-screening reports that list past evictions and court filings.
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Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial.
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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.
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Just strictly from a business standpoint, kids are a liability to landlords, and they actually provoke evictions.
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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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Many times when we are talking about displacement, we talk about it within the frame of gentrification, which focuses on transitioning neighborhoods. But man, every city I've looked at, Milwaukee included, most evictions are right there, smack dab in ungentrifying, poor, segregated communities.
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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.
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Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.
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Tenants don't have any right to court-appointed attorneys in civil court, so they're either facing their landlord - or his or her attorney - alone, or they just don't show up. That reflects a severe power imbalance.
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A fire in a forest is alive with terror and power.
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It is very rare in the life of an intellectual to see your support network show up all at once.