Top 152 Quotes & Sayings by Matthew Desmond

This country has so much wealth and so much poverty, and that seemed wrong to me. 'Evicted' was my Ph.D. dissertation.

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.

Home is the center of life. It's the wellspring of personhood. It's where we say we're ourselves.

My dad was a preacher.

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.

I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.

A lot of us who grew up in the country, hunting and fishing, being very familiar with the woods and dirt roads, have the skill set you need to fight fire.

Healthcare providers have helped me see that decent, safe housing can promote physical and mental wellness; and engaged citizens have shown me the civic potential of stable, vibrant blocks where neighbours know one another by name.

There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.

An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event.

I left college with a deep sense that I needed to understand poverty more.

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.

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.

A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential: its ability to work together to change the community and change their lives.

It takes a good amount of time and money to establish a home. Eviction can erase all that.

You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.

The face of the eviction epidemic is moms and kids, especially poor moms from predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods.

Even growing up the way I did, I was shocked by the level of poverty I saw as a college student. I thought the best way to understand it was to get close to it on the ground level.

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.

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.

When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level.

Eviction comes with a record, too, and just as a criminal record can bar you from receiving certain benefits or getting a foothold in the labor market, the record of eviction comes with consequences as well. It can bar you from getting good housing in a good neighborhood.

The home is the center of life - a refuge from the grind of work, pressure of school, menace of the streets, a place to be ourselves.

Eviction reveals people's vulnerability and desperation as well as their ingenuity and guts.

You do learn how to cope from those who are coping.

We can start with housing, the sturdiest of footholds for economic mobility. A national affordable housing program would be an anti-poverty effort, human capital investment, community improvement plan, and public health initiative all rolled into one.

I'm from a small town, and I thought I would be a lawyer.

National data on evictions aren't collected, although national data on foreclosures are. And so if anyone wants to, kind of, get to know any statistical research about evictions, they have to really dig in the annals of legal records.

I think I've read all of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is a lot. He started off with comprehensive field work in Philadelphia, publishing a book in 1899 called 'The Philadelphia Negro'. It was this wonderful combination of clear statistical data and ethnographic data.

It is very rare in the life of an intellectual to see your support network show up all at once.

Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health, not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.

Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.

There is a reason so many Americans choose to develop their net worth through homeownership: It is a proven wealth builder and savings compeller.

A lot of people didn't know just what eviction does to people, how it really sets their life on a different and much more difficult path, acting not like a condition of poverty but a cause of it.

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.

The poor don't want some small life. They don't want to game the system. They want to contribute, and they want to thrive. But poverty reduces people born for better things.

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.'

When I was confronted with just the bare facts of poverty and inequality in America, it always disturbed and confused me.

In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves.

I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.

If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma.

Home is where children find safety and security, where we find our identities, where citizenship starts. It usually starts with believing you're part of a community, and that is essential to having a stable home.

The standard of 'affordable' housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family's income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent.

I don't think we can fix poverty without fixing housing, and I don't think we can address housing without understanding landlords.

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.

The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about.

African American women, and moms in particular, are evicted at disproportionately high rates.

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.

It's true that eviction affects the young and the old, the sick and the able-bodied. It affects white folks and black folks and Hispanic folks and immigrants. If you spend time in housing court, you see a really diverse array of folks there.

I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart.

Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.

If eviction has these massive consequences that we all pay for, a very smart use of public funds would be to invest in legal services for folks facing eviction.

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.

Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.

Poverty is a relationship that involves a lot of folks, rich and poor alike. I was looking for something that brought a lot of different people in a room. Eviction does that, embroils landlords and tenants, lawyers and social workers.

Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.

Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.

I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.