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" 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. "

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

Matthew Desmond

Reports

Sell

Court

" We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. "

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

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

" Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today. "

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

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

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

" 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

" Poverty is not just a sad accident, but it's also a result of the fact that some people make a lot of money off low-income families and directly contribute to their poverty. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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

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

" Why young men from the country become firefighters is hard to explain to people who are not from the country. For most of us, it's not about the rush, which fades with time, or the paycheck. We could earn more working for the railroad or a car dealership. I figure it's about the land. "

" Eviction comes with a record, too, and just as a criminal record can bar you from receiving certain benefits or getting a foothold in the labor market, the record of eviction comes with consequences as well. It can bar you from getting good housing in a good neighborhood. "

" 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.' "

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

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

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

" Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I have always been really troubled by the amount of poverty in America. Americans are matched in their rich democracy with the depth and expanse of poverty. That's really always unsettled me. "

" If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the canard about this rich country being unable to afford more. "

" Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty. "

" My dad was a preacher. "

Matthew Desmond

Dad

Preacher