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" If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice. "

Matthew Desmond

America

Years

Writing

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" Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial. "

" A lot of the stories about urban America tend to be written on the margins. We focus a lot on these big global cities - New York, San Francisco - or we focus on cities that are having the toughest time - Detroit, Newark, Camden. "

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

" Evictions cause job loss. Because it's such a destabilizing, stressful event, they lose their footing in the labor market. It has big impacts on people's health, especially mental health. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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

Country

Poor

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up? "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" Public-sector union organisers have told me about how firefighters, police officers, and nurses can no longer afford to live in the cities they serve and protect. "

Matthew Desmond

Protect

Police