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

Matthew Desmond

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" If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" 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

" The face of the eviction epidemic is moms and kids, especially poor moms from predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods. "

Matthew Desmond

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

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

" 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

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

Matthew Desmond

" I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" When I left Milwaukee, and I had all these stories. I felt so responsible for people. It's a heck of a thing to do, to try to write someone's story. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" 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

" Most poor families are living completely unassisted in a private rental market, devoting most of their income to 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

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

" Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" In February 1932, the 'Times' published an account of community resistance to the eviction of three families in the Bronx, observing, 'Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000.' "

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

" 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

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

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

" You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond