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" 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. "

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" 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

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

" 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. "

" When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level. "

" What we're seeing is that even in high poverty neighborhoods, the average cost of renting is quickly approaching the total income of welfare recipients and low wage workers. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty. "

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

" 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

" 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

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

" Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market. "

" 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

Home

Losing

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" If we continue to tolerate this level of poverty in our cities, and go along with eviction as commonplace in poor neighborhoods, it's not for a lack of resources. It will be a lack of something else. "

Matthew Desmond

Will

Lack

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

" Eviction reveals people's vulnerability and desperation as well as their ingenuity and guts. "

" It is very rare in the life of an intellectual to see your support network show up all at once. "

" Since the publication of 'Evicted', I have had countless conversations with concerned families across America. Teachers in under-served communities have told me about high classroom turnover rates, which hinder students' ability to reach their full potential. "

Matthew Desmond

Potential

America

" When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up? "

" 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. "

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

" Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11% reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31% of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44.7%. "

" 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. "

" Poverty is not just a sad accident, but it's also a result of the fact that some people make a lot of money off low-income families and directly contribute to their poverty. "