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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

Mind

Policy

Think

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" There is a deep connection, when we're talking about certain market forces and a legal structure that inhibits low or moderate income families from getting ahead. Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market. "

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

Will

Lack

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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

Work

Influence

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" The high cost of housing is crushing poor families and sending them to a state of desperation. "

" 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

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

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

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