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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. "

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" 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

Thought

Growing Up

College

" Without the ability to plant roots and invest in your community or your school - because you're paying 60, 70, 80 percent of your income to rent - and eviction becomes something of an inevitability to you, it denies you certain freedoms. "

" Eviction reveals people's vulnerability and desperation as well as their ingenuity and guts. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Home is the center of life. It's the wellspring of personhood. It's where we say we're ourselves. "

" 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. "

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

" Arguably, the families most at need of housing assistance are systematically denied it because they're stamped with an eviction record. Moms and kids are bearing the brunt of those consequences. "

" 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. "

" My dad was a preacher. "

Matthew Desmond

Dad

Preacher

" A lot of people didn't know just what eviction does to people, how it really sets their life on a different and much more difficult path, acting not like a condition of poverty but a cause of it. "

Matthew Desmond

Life

Know

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Matthew Desmond

Poverty

Understand

" 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.' "

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

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

" Hundreds of data-mining companies sell landlords tenant-screening reports that list past evictions and court filings. "

" 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. "

" When I left Milwaukee, and I had all these stories. I felt so responsible for people. It's a heck of a thing to do, to try to write someone's story. "

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

" You meet folks who are funny and really smart and persistent and loving that are confronting this thing we call poverty, which is just a shorthand for this way of life that holds you underwater. And you just wonder what our country would be if we allowed these people to flourish and reach their full potential. "

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

" 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. "