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" Housing is a social issue: how we live and where we live. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" Why young men from the country become firefighters is hard to explain to people who are not from the country. For most of us, it's not about the rush, which fades with time, or the paycheck. We could earn more working for the railroad or a car dealership. I figure it's about the land. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" You lose your home, you are much more likely to lose your job the year following. The reason for that comes back to the bandwidth problem: You're so focused on this event that you're making mistakes at work; you can relocate further from work, which can increase your tardiness and absenteeism and cause you to lose your job. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market. "

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

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

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

" If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out. "

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

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this. I understand that poverty is never just poverty. It's often this collection of maladies, this compounded adversity. I'm not naive about the problem. But I think that stable, steady housing is one of the surest footholds we could have on the road to financial stability. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" My dad was a preacher. "

Matthew Desmond

" Public-sector union organisers have told me about how firefighters, police officers, and nurses can no longer afford to live in the cities they serve and protect. "

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

" 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

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

Matthew Desmond