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" This country has so much wealth and so much poverty, and that seemed wrong to me. 'Evicted' was my Ph.D. dissertation. "

Matthew Desmond

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

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

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" 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. "

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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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" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have. "

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" I felt that writing about peoples' lives was a heck of a responsibility, and I wanted to know them in a deep way. "

Matthew Desmond

" If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" 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

" I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography. "

Matthew Desmond

" Kids increase people's risk of eviction. "

Matthew Desmond

" Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" A lot of the stories about urban America tend to be written on the margins. We focus a lot on these big global cities - New York, San Francisco - or we focus on cities that are having the toughest time - Detroit, Newark, Camden. "

Matthew Desmond

" Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities. "

Matthew Desmond

" Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" The cost of evictions varies a lot, but it could be for landlords an expensive process as well. Among the costs for landlords as well is the emotional costs of an eviction. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" I love Milwaukee, the rust belt. It's a very special part of America that's full of promise but also full of pain, where poverty is acute. "

Matthew Desmond