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

Matthew Desmond

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" 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%. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective. "

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

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" The church should lead on issues of housing and affordability. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond