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

Matthew Desmond

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" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it. "

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

Matthew Desmond

" A lot of us who grew up in the country, hunting and fishing, being very familiar with the woods and dirt roads, have the skill set you need to fight fire. "

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" 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

" 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

" Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11% reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31% of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44.7%. "

Matthew Desmond

" You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff. "

Matthew Desmond

" The standard of 'affordable' housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family's income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent. "

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

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

Matthew Desmond

" The poor don't want some small life. They don't want to game the system. They want to contribute, and they want to thrive. But poverty reduces people born for better things. "

Matthew Desmond

" National data on evictions aren't collected, although national data on foreclosures are. And so if anyone wants to, kind of, get to know any statistical research about evictions, they have to really dig in the annals of legal records. "

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

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

Matthew Desmond

" You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one. "

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" Home is the wellspring of personhood, where our identity takes root; where civic life begins. America is supposed to be a place where you can better yourself, your family, and your community. "

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

" There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. "

Matthew Desmond

" An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event. "

Matthew Desmond

" It's true that eviction affects the young and the old, the sick and the able-bodied. It affects white folks and black folks and Hispanic folks and immigrants. If you spend time in housing court, you see a really diverse array of folks there. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond