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" Trying to learn from communities and engage with policy makers and community organizers all across the country is really important to me. "

Matthew Desmond

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" Families who get evicted tend to live in worse housing than they did before, and they live in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and higher crime rates than they did before. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" 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

" My dad was a preacher. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" 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

" Child Protection Services can get all up in your business if you have kids. Just strictly from a business standpoint, kids are a liability to landlords, and they actually provoke evictions. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

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

Matthew Desmond

" We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. "

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

" Since evictions go through court, it has a record that comes with it, and many landlords that I spend time with use that as a big screening mechanism. And that's really the reason, we think, families are pushed into worse housing and worse neighborhoods after their evictions. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

" If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else. "

Matthew Desmond

" Most cities don't have a just cause eviction law. Most allow no cause evictions, as well as evictions for nonpayment. "

Matthew Desmond

" The face of America's eviction epidemic is a mom with kids. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

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

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

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

African American

" Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate. "

Matthew Desmond

" Tenants don't have any right to court-appointed attorneys in civil court, so they're either facing their landlord - or his or her attorney - alone, or they just don't show up. That reflects a severe power imbalance. "

Matthew Desmond

" The church should lead on issues of housing and affordability. "

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 left college with a deep sense that I needed to understand poverty more. "

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond