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

Matthew Desmond

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" The texture and hardship of poverty and eviction is something that I think left the deepest impression on me, and I hope that I try to convey a little bit of that to the reader. "

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" Everywhere else, we are someone else, but at home, we remove our masks. "

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" When we think of entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare immediately come to mind. But by any fair standard, the holy trinity of United States social policy should also include the mortgage-interest deduction - an enormous benefit that has also become politically untouchable. "

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" 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

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

Matthew Desmond

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

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. "

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

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

" Between 2009 and 2011, more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were displaced involuntarily, whether by formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation. "

Matthew Desmond

" It takes a good amount of time and money to establish a home. Eviction can erase all that. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

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

Matthew Desmond

" Most poor families are living completely unassisted in a private rental market, devoting most of their income to housing. 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" My dad was a preacher. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nation's racial wealth gap. "

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

" A lot flows from the question: Is having decent, stable housing part of what it means to live in this country? And I think we should answer 'yes.' "

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

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

Matthew Desmond

" There is a deep connection, when we're talking about certain market forces and a legal structure that inhibits low or moderate income families from getting ahead. Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level. "

Matthew Desmond

" Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond