Matthew Desmond Quotes
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All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes.
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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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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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Eviction is much more an inevitability than a result of irresponsibility.
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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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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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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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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 come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.
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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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A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country.
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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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Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.
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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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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.
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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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Just strictly from a business standpoint, kids are a liability to landlords, and they actually provoke evictions.
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Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial.
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This country has so much wealth and so much poverty, and that seemed wrong to me. 'Evicted' was my Ph.D. dissertation.
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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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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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You lose your home, you are much more likely to lose your job the year following. The reason for that comes back to the bandwidth problem: You're so focused on this event that you're making mistakes at work; you can relocate further from work, which can increase your tardiness and absenteeism and cause you to lose your job.