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" The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about. "
Matthew Desmond
Closest
You
Things
Related Quotes:
" 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
" Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street. "
Matthew Desmond
Street
Home
Houses
" 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. "
Matthew Desmond
Children
Safety
Home
" 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
" 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
" There is a reason so many Americans choose to develop their net worth through homeownership: It is a proven wealth builder and savings compeller. "
Matthew Desmond
Reason
Through
Wealth
" I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school. "
Matthew Desmond
Back
Again
Then
" Many times when we are talking about displacement, we talk about it within the frame of gentrification, which focuses on transitioning neighborhoods. But man, every city I've looked at, Milwaukee included, most evictions are right there, smack dab in ungentrifying, poor, segregated communities. "
Matthew Desmond
Talk
City
Man
" 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. "
Matthew Desmond
Rich
America
Poverty
" If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions. "
Matthew Desmond
Community
Family
Need
" 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
Incarceration
Men
Poor
" If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else. "
Matthew Desmond
Poverty
America
Something
" Evictions cause job loss. Because it's such a destabilizing, stressful event, they lose their footing in the labor market. It has big impacts on people's health, especially mental health. "
Matthew Desmond
Job
Mental Health
People
" 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
" Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nation's racial wealth gap. "
Matthew Desmond
Racial
Differences
Gap
" 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
" If I wrote in Jacob Riis' time, I'd be writing about teeming slums in our cities and kids dying of tuberculosis or outhouses in Philadelphia or kids losing their toes because they were living in homes without heat. He took on a battle in 'The Battle with the Slums' - and we won. "
Matthew Desmond
Losing
Battle
Living
" In February 1932, the 'Times' published an account of community resistance to the eviction of three families in the Bronx, observing, 'Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000.' "
Matthew Desmond
Resistance
Three
Only
" 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
" I had come to college believing in a story that if you worked hard, the American dream was reachable. "
Matthew Desmond
American Dream
College
Story
" American greatness can be further unlocked if opportunity is expanded to all people within its borders. "
Matthew Desmond
Greatness
Opportunity
American
" 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
Working
Carry
Day
" 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
Funny
People
Life
" If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling. "
Matthew Desmond
Just
Catalog
You
" We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. "
Matthew Desmond
Poverty
Housing
Creation
" If you have someone who is paying 88 percent of her income on rent, and we have laws that allow a landlord to evict a tenant who falls behind under those circumstances, eviction becomes an inevitability. "
Matthew Desmond
You
Someone
Rent
" Hundreds of data-mining companies sell landlords tenant-screening reports that list past evictions and court filings. "
Matthew Desmond
Reports
Sell
Court
" You do learn how to cope from those who are coping. "
Matthew Desmond
Who
Learn
Those
" 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
" National data on evictions aren't collected, although national data on foreclosures are. And so if anyone wants to, kind of, get to know any statistical research about evictions, they have to really dig in the annals of legal records. "
Matthew Desmond
Dig
Data
Research