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

Matthew Desmond

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" American greatness can be further unlocked if opportunity is expanded to all people within its borders. "

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" 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. "

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

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

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

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" Ours was not always a nation of homeowners; the New Deal fashioned it so, particularly through the G.I. Bill of Rights. "

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" Home is where children find safety and security, where we find our identities, where citizenship starts. It usually starts with believing you're part of a community, and that is essential to having a stable home. "

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" 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

" Kids increase people's risk of eviction. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" I had come to college believing in a story that if you worked hard, the American dream was reachable. "

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

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

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" These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

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

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

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

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" 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. "

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" There were evictions that I saw that I know I'll never forget. In one case, the sheriff and the movers came up on a house full of children. The mom had passed away, and the children had just gone on living there. And the sheriff executed the eviction order - moved the kids' stuff out on the street on a cold, rainy day. "

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

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