Top 152 Quotes & Sayings by Matthew Desmond - Page 2

I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.

If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions.

You have to understand the role the landlords are playing in shaping neighborhoods, how they potentially expand or reduce inequality, how their profits are a direct result of some tenant's poverty.

Most cities don't have a just cause eviction law. Most allow no cause evictions, as well as evictions for nonpayment.

You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.

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.

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.

If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling.

I had come to college believing in a story that if you worked hard, the American dream was reachable.

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.

Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.

Eviction causes loss. You lose not only your home but also your possessions, which are thrown onto the curb or taken by movers, and often you can't keep up payments.

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.

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.

You meet folks who are funny and really smart and persistent and loving that are confronting this thing we call poverty, which is just a shorthand for this way of life that holds you underwater. And you just wonder what our country would be if we allowed these people to flourish and reach their full potential.

The face of America's eviction epidemic is a mom with kids.

Eviction comes with a record. Just like a criminal record can hurt you in the jobs market, eviction can hurt you in the housing market. A lot of landlords turn folks away who have an eviction, and a lot of public housing authorities do the same.

Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities.

I saw people get fired after their eviction. But when I found that if you get evicted, your chances of losing your job increase by 20 percent, that's when it really hit home for me.

I started a student organization that was basically designed to connect students with homeless folks. We visited them and sometimes brought food, but mostly we were there for swapping stories.

Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.

Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today.

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.

Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nation's racial wealth gap.

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.

Just strictly from a business standpoint, kids are a liability to landlords, and they actually provoke evictions.

I teach at Harvard, and focusing on understanding this problem on a national level is a big priority of mine right now - where evictions are going up and down, what cities are actually instituting policies that work, what housing insecurity is doing to our cities, neighbourhoods, our kids.

A fire in a forest is alive with terror and power.

American greatness can be further unlocked if opportunity is expanded to all people within its borders.

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.

Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.

The church should lead on issues of housing and affordability.

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.

The high cost of housing is crushing poor families and sending them to a state of desperation.

I felt that writing about peoples' lives was a heck of a responsibility, and I wanted to know them in a deep way.

You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent.

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.

Poverty is not just a sad accident, but it's also a result of the fact that some people make a lot of money off low-income families and directly contribute to their poverty.

If I wrote in Jacob Riis' time, I'd be writing about teeming slums in our cities and kids dying of tuberculosis or outhouses in Philadelphia or kids losing their toes because they were living in homes without heat. He took on a battle in 'The Battle with the Slums' - and we won.

I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school.

Evictions used to be rare in this country. They used to draw crowds. There are scenes in literature where you can come upon an eviction - like, in 'Invisible Man' there's the famous eviction scene in Harlem, and people are gathered around, and they move the family back in.

All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes.

Most poor families are living completely unassisted in a private rental market, devoting most of their income to housing. 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.

When we think of entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare immediately come to mind. But by any fair standard, the holy trinity of United States social policy should also include the mortgage-interest deduction - an enormous benefit that has also become politically untouchable.

Ours was not always a nation of homeowners; the New Deal fashioned it so, particularly through the G.I. Bill of Rights.

There were evictions that I saw that I know I'll never forget. In one case, the sheriff and the movers came up on a house full of children. The mom had passed away, and the children had just gone on living there. And the sheriff executed the eviction order - moved the kids' stuff out on the street on a cold, rainy day.

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.

A lot flows from the question: Is having decent, stable housing part of what it means to live in this country? And I think we should answer 'yes.'

Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.

Everywhere else, we are someone else, but at home, we remove our masks.

Home is the wellspring of personhood, where our identity takes root; where civic life begins. America is supposed to be a place where you can better yourself, your family, and your community.

When you fight fires for a few seasons, you know what to expect. Your heart doesn't race as much as it did.

If you have someone who is paying 88 percent of her income on rent, and we have laws that allow a landlord to evict a tenant who falls behind under those circumstances, eviction becomes an inevitability.

I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty.

We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.

Arguably, the families most at need of housing assistance are systematically denied it because they're stamped with an eviction record. Moms and kids are bearing the brunt of those consequences.

I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this. I understand that poverty is never just poverty. It's often this collection of maladies, this compounded adversity. I'm not naive about the problem. But I think that stable, steady housing is one of the surest footholds we could have on the road to financial stability.

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.

Trying to learn from communities and engage with policy makers and community organizers all across the country is really important to me.

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.