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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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" 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

" 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. "

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

Matthew Desmond

Poverty

Understand

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

" 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. "

" You do learn how to cope from those who are coping. "

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

" A lot of people didn't know just what eviction does to people, how it really sets their life on a different and much more difficult path, acting not like a condition of poverty but a cause of it. "

Matthew Desmond

Life

Know

" 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

Same

You

" 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. "

" The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Kids increase people's risk of eviction. "

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

" 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. "

" You have to understand the role the landlords are playing in shaping neighborhoods, how they potentially expand or reduce inequality, how their profits are a direct result of some tenant's poverty. "

" 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

Than

Building

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

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

" 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

" Families who get evicted tend to live in worse housing than they did before, and they live in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and higher crime rates than they did before. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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