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" 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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" 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

Perspective

People

College

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques - from overdraft fees to student loans subsidizing for-profit colleges - specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor. This problem generally goes unrecognized by policy makers. "

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

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

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

Matthew Desmond

Poverty

Understand

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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%. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

People

Community

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

Country

Poor

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

Matthew Desmond

Looking

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

Home

Losing

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

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

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