Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Matthew Desmond

Related Quotes:

" Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial. "

Matthew Desmond

" You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent. "

Matthew Desmond

" No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become. "

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

" 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

" 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

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" Without the ability to plant roots and invest in your community or your school - because you're paying 60, 70, 80 percent of your income to rent - and eviction becomes something of an inevitability to you, it denies you certain freedoms. "

Matthew Desmond

" Some white Milwakeeans still referred to the North side as 'the cire', as they did in the 1960s, and if they ventured into it, they saw street after street of sagging duplexes, fading murals, twenty-four hour daycares, and corner stores with 'WIC Accepted Here' signs. "

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

" When we think of entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare immediately come to mind. But by any fair standard, the holy trinity of United States social policy should also include the mortgage-interest deduction - an enormous benefit that has also become politically untouchable. "

Matthew Desmond

" Eviction is much more an inevitability than a result of irresponsibility. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Public-sector union organisers have told me about how firefighters, police officers, and nurses can no longer afford to live in the cities they serve and protect. "

Matthew Desmond

" The texture and hardship of poverty and eviction is something that I think left the deepest impression on me, and I hope that I try to convey a little bit of that to the reader. "

Matthew Desmond

" You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed. "

Matthew Desmond

" When I was confronted with just the bare facts of poverty and inequality in America, it always disturbed and confused me. "

Matthew Desmond

" My dad was a preacher. "

Matthew Desmond

" In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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

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

Matthew Desmond

" 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

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond

" 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. "

Matthew Desmond