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" If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out. "

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

Matthew Desmond

Country

Wrong

Wealth

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

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

" I think I've read all of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is a lot. He started off with comprehensive field work in Philadelphia, publishing a book in 1899 called 'The Philadelphia Negro'. It was this wonderful combination of clear statistical data and ethnographic data. "

" Libraries are not just places where people go read a book, but places where an immigrant goes to take English lessons and where folks out of a job search for community. "

Matthew Desmond

People

Community

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

" Since the publication of 'Evicted', I have had countless conversations with concerned families across America. Teachers in under-served communities have told me about high classroom turnover rates, which hinder students' ability to reach their full potential. "

Matthew Desmond

Potential

America

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

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

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

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

" Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. "

" This was what a lot of us, mainly young men, did in the summers in northern Arizona. This is how I put myself through college. I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school. "

" 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. "

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

" If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else. "

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

" 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 love Milwaukee, the rust belt. It's a very special part of America that's full of promise but also full of pain, where poverty is acute. "

" Trying to learn from communities and engage with policy makers and community organizers all across the country is really important to me. "

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

" When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes. "

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

" If we continue to tolerate this level of poverty in our cities, and go along with eviction as commonplace in poor neighborhoods, it's not for a lack of resources. It will be a lack of something else. "

Matthew Desmond

Will

Lack