Matthew Desmond Quotes

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

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

Between 2009 and 2011, more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were displaced involuntarily, whether by formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation.

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.

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.

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

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.

Public-sector union organisers have told me about how firefighters, police officers, and nurses can no longer afford to live in the cities they serve and protect.

Housing is a social issue: how we live and where we live.

Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11% reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31% of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44.7%.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street.

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

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.

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

These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.

When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.

Kids increase people’s risk of eviction.

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

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.

Hundreds of data-mining companies sell landlords tenant-screening reports that list past evictions and court filings.

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.

‘Sag Harbor’ brought me a new readership – it’s a coming of age tale about growing up in the ’80s.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that’s not trivial.

When you’re following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way – it’s a really tough time, but it’s also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Since evictions go through court, it has a record that comes with it, and many landlords that I spend time with use that as a big screening mechanism. And that’s really the reason, we think, families are pushed into worse housing and worse neighborhoods after their evictions.

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.

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.

Since the publication of ‘Evicted’, I have had countless conversations with concerned families across America. Teachers in under-served communities have told me about high classroom turnover rates, which hinder students’ ability to reach their full potential.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.

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.

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

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.

Some white Milwakeeans still referred to the North side as ‘the cire’, as they did in the 1960s, and if they ventured into it, they saw street after street of sagging duplexes, fading murals, twenty-four hour daycares, and corner stores with ‘WIC Accepted Here’ signs.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

What we’re seeing is that even in high poverty neighborhoods, the average cost of renting is quickly approaching the total income of welfare recipients and low wage workers.

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.

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 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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

Eviction is much more an inevitability than a result of irresponsibility.

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.

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

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.

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.

If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it’s not pretty – it’s full of trauma. And we’re able to accept trauma with certain groups, like with soldiers, for instance – we understand that they face trauma and that trauma can be connected to things like depression or acts of violence later on in life.

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

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

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.

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

I think there are ways that graduate students can fact-check their work. I think there are ways that we can do this that don’t require massive amounts of resources.

Evictions cause job loss. Because it’s such a destabilizing, stressful event, they lose their footing in the labor market. It has big impacts on people’s health, especially mental health.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country.

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