Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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. "
Matthew Desmond
Game
Small
Poverty
Related Quotes:
" I met a landlord who will pay you to move at the end of the week and let you use his van. That's a really nice kind of eviction. I met a landlord who will take your door off. There are 101 ways to move a family out. "
Matthew Desmond
End
Nice
Week
" 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. "
Matthew Desmond
America
Years
Writing
" I don't think we can fix poverty without fixing housing, and I don't think we can address housing without understanding landlords. "
Matthew Desmond
Poverty
Think
Understanding
" It is very rare in the life of an intellectual to see your support network show up all at once. "
Matthew Desmond
See
Intellectual
Life
" Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have. "
Matthew Desmond
Fire
Beautiful
Very
" I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty. "
Matthew Desmond
Poverty
Journalism
Tradition
" 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
Lose
Loss
Only
" 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
Almost
Crisis
Decade
" 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. "
Matthew Desmond
Children
Know
Street
" Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health, not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself. "
Matthew Desmond
Yourself
Depression
You
" I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities. "
Matthew Desmond
Poverty
Housing
You
" We can start with housing, the sturdiest of footholds for economic mobility. A national affordable housing program would be an anti-poverty effort, human capital investment, community improvement plan, and public health initiative all rolled into one. "
Matthew Desmond
Health
Improvement
Community
" Ours was not always a nation of homeowners; the New Deal fashioned it so, particularly through the G.I. Bill of Rights. "
Matthew Desmond
Always
Rights
Bill Of Rights
" 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
Summer
School
Myself
" I'm from a small town, and I thought I would be a lawyer. "
Matthew Desmond
Lawyer
Town
Small Town
" 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
Legal
Connection
Business
" You have to understand the role the landlords are playing in shaping neighborhoods, how they potentially expand or reduce inequality, how their profits are a direct result of some tenant's poverty. "
Matthew Desmond
You
Poverty
Role
" Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities. "
Matthew Desmond
Old
Affects
Young
" The high cost of housing is crushing poor families and sending them to a state of desperation. "
Matthew Desmond
Desperation
Poor
Cost
" 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. "
Matthew Desmond
Mean
Yes
Right
" I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this. I understand that poverty is never just poverty. It's often this collection of maladies, this compounded adversity. I'm not naive about the problem. But I think that stable, steady housing is one of the surest footholds we could have on the road to financial stability. "
Matthew Desmond
Want
Think
Adversity
" I want my work to influence public conversation, to turn heads, and to bear witness to this problem that's raging in our cities. If journalism helps me with that, I'll draw on journalism... and I'm not going to worry too much if academics get troubled over that distinction. "
Matthew Desmond
Work
Influence
Me
" 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
More
" In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves. "
Matthew Desmond
Harder
Poor
Way
" If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling. "
Matthew Desmond
Just
Catalog
You
" Just strictly from a business standpoint, kids are a liability to landlords, and they actually provoke evictions. "
Matthew Desmond
Business
Just
Kids
" 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. "
Matthew Desmond
Life
Community
Identity
" When I left Milwaukee, and I had all these stories. I felt so responsible for people. It's a heck of a thing to do, to try to write someone's story. "
Matthew Desmond
People
Responsible
Someone
" 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
More
" 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. "
Matthew Desmond
Face
Depression
Violence