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" 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. "

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" 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? "

Matthew Desmond

You

End

People

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

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

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

" Healthcare providers have helped me see that decent, safe housing can promote physical and mental wellness; and engaged citizens have shown me the civic potential of stable, vibrant blocks where neighbours know one another by name. "

Matthew Desmond

Potential

Name

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

Matthew Desmond

Poverty

Understand

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma. And we're able to accept trauma with certain groups, like with soldiers, for instance - we understand that they face trauma and that trauma can be connected to things like depression or acts of violence later on in life. "

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" The poor don't want some small life. They don't want to game the system. They want to contribute, and they want to thrive. But poverty reduces people born for better things. "

" The high cost of housing is crushing poor families and sending them to a state of desperation. "

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

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

" No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become. "

" 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. "

" I teach at Harvard, and focusing on understanding this problem on a national level is a big priority of mine right now - where evictions are going up and down, what cities are actually instituting policies that work, what housing insecurity is doing to our cities, neighbourhoods, our kids. "

" If eviction has these massive consequences that we all pay for, a very smart use of public funds would be to invest in legal services for folks facing eviction. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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