Matthew Desmond Quotes
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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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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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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.
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I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.
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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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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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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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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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There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.
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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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Eviction is much more an inevitability than a result of irresponsibility.
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A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country.
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Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial.
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Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.
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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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It is very rare in the life of an intellectual to see your support network show up all at once.
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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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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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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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Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.
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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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Families, when they get a housing voucher, they move a lot less. They move into better neighborhoods. Their kids go to the same school more consistently. Their kids have more food, and they get stronger. There are massive returns.