Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Matthew Desmond

Related Quotes:

" An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" Kids increase people's risk of eviction. "

Matthew Desmond

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

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" My dad was a preacher. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

African American

" 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. "

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

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" There were evictions that I saw that I know I'll never forget. In one case, the sheriff and the movers came up on a house full of children. The mom had passed away, and the children had just gone on living there. And the sheriff executed the eviction order - moved the kids' stuff out on the street on a cold, rainy day. "

Matthew Desmond

" Trying to learn from communities and engage with policy makers and community organizers all across the country is really important to me. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" If you have someone who is paying 88 percent of her income on rent, and we have laws that allow a landlord to evict a tenant who falls behind under those circumstances, eviction becomes an inevitability. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond