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" I felt that writing about peoples' lives was a heck of a responsibility, and I wanted to know them in a deep way. "

Matthew Desmond

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" My dad was a preacher. "

Matthew Desmond

" This country has so much wealth and so much poverty, and that seemed wrong to me. 'Evicted' was my Ph.D. dissertation. "

Matthew Desmond

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

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

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

Matthew Desmond

" Healthcare providers have helped me see that decent, safe housing can promote physical and mental wellness; and engaged citizens have shown me the civic potential of stable, vibrant blocks where neighbours know one another by name. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart. "

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

" Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

Matthew Desmond

" American greatness can be further unlocked if opportunity is expanded to all people within its borders. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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

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

" The home is the center of life - a refuge from the grind of work, pressure of school, menace of the streets, a place to be ourselves. "

Matthew Desmond

" When you fight fires for a few seasons, you know what to expect. Your heart doesn't race as much as it did. "

Matthew Desmond

" I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school. "

Matthew Desmond

" Evictions used to be rare in this country. They used to draw crowds. There are scenes in literature where you can come upon an eviction - like, in 'Invisible Man' there's the famous eviction scene in Harlem, and people are gathered around, and they move the family back in. "

Matthew Desmond

" Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street. "

Matthew Desmond

" It takes a good amount of time and money to establish a home. Eviction can erase all that. "

Matthew Desmond

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

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

" African American women, and moms in particular, are evicted at disproportionately high rates. "

Matthew Desmond

African American

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

Matthew Desmond

" Most cities don't have a just cause eviction law. Most allow no cause evictions, as well as evictions for nonpayment. "

Matthew Desmond