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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

Book

Data

Think

" If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

Home

Losing

" I'm from a small town, and I thought I would be a lawyer. "

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

" Child Protection Services can get all up in your business if you have kids. Just strictly from a business standpoint, kids are a liability to landlords, and they actually provoke evictions. "

Matthew Desmond

Business

Protection

" 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. "

" Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I teach at Harvard, and focusing on understanding this problem on a national level is a big priority of mine right now - where evictions are going up and down, what cities are actually instituting policies that work, what housing insecurity is doing to our cities, neighbourhoods, our kids. "

" Poverty is a relationship that involves a lot of folks, rich and poor alike. I was looking for something that brought a lot of different people in a room. Eviction does that, embroils landlords and tenants, lawyers and social workers. "

" Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques - from overdraft fees to student loans subsidizing for-profit colleges - specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor. This problem generally goes unrecognized by policy makers. "

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

" 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 came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor. "

" If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the canard about this rich country being unable to afford more. "

" These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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