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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. "

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" I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" The home is the center of life - a refuge from the grind of work, pressure of school, menace of the streets, a place to be ourselves. "

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

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

" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty. "

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

" Do we believe housing is a right and that affordable housing is part of what it should mean to be an American? I say yes. "

" 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. "

" Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Evictions used to be rare in this country. They used to draw crowds. There are scenes in literature where you can come upon an eviction - like, in 'Invisible Man' there's the famous eviction scene in Harlem, and people are gathered around, and they move the family back in. "