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" I started a student organization that was basically designed to connect students with homeless folks. We visited them and sometimes brought food, but mostly we were there for swapping stories. "

Matthew Desmond

Homeless

Food

Student

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" My dad was a preacher. "

Matthew Desmond

Dad

Preacher

" 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. "

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

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

" Some white Milwakeeans still referred to the North side as 'the cire', as they did in the 1960s, and if they ventured into it, they saw street after street of sagging duplexes, fading murals, twenty-four hour daycares, and corner stores with 'WIC Accepted Here' signs. "

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

" The face of America's eviction epidemic is a mom with kids. "

" Moms that get evicted are depressed and have higher rates of depressive symptoms two years later. That has to affect their interactions with their kids and their sense of happiness. You add all that together, and it's just really obvious to me that eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty. "

" 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. "

" I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography. "

" 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. "

" It is very rare in the life of an intellectual to see your support network show up all at once. "

" A fire in a forest is alive with terror and power. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn't only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, 'Shoot, eviction does that.' "

Matthew Desmond

Looking

" I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities. "

" 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. "

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

" Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed. "

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

" In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves. "

" 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

Work

Influence

" 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. "

" 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. "

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