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

Matthew Desmond

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

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

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" 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. "

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

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

Matthew Desmond

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

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

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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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" 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. "

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

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

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" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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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" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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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" 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. "

Matthew Desmond