Top 105 Matthew Desmond Quotes

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

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.

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

This was what a lot of us, mainly young men, did in the summers in northern Arizona. This is how I put myself through college. I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school.

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.

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

If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent – at least when it comes to housing – we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the canard about this rich country being unable to afford more.

Libraries are not just places where people go read a book, but places where an immigrant goes to take English lessons and where folks out of a job search for community.

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.

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

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

I don’t think we can fix poverty without fixing housing, and I don’t think we can address housing without understanding landlords.

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

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.

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

Poverty is a relationship that involves a lot of folks, rich and poor alike. I was looking for something that brought a lot of different people in a room. Eviction does that, embroils landlords and tenants, lawyers and social workers.

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

Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.

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

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.

The things you’re closest to are often the things you know least about.

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.

Eviction causes loss. You lose not only your home but also your possessions, which are thrown onto the curb or taken by movers, and often you can’t keep up payments.

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.

The face of the eviction epidemic is moms and kids, especially poor moms from predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods.

If you look at the American Household Survey, the last time we did that in 2013, renters in over 2.8 million homes thought they would be evicted soon.

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

You see one eviction, and you’re overcome, but then there’s another one and another one and another one.

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.

I don’t think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.

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

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

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.

The high cost of housing is crushing poor families and sending them to a state of desperation.

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

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

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.

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

Even growing up the way I did, I was shocked by the level of poverty I saw as a college student. I thought the best way to understand it was to get close to it on the ground level.

Arguably, the families most at need of housing assistance are systematically denied it because they’re stamped with an eviction record. Moms and kids are bearing the brunt of those consequences.

I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school.

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.

Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health, not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.

A lot of us who grew up in the country, hunting and fishing, being very familiar with the woods and dirt roads, have the skill set you need to fight fire.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.

There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.

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

The home is the center of life – a refuge from the grind of work, pressure of school, menace of the streets, a place to be ourselves.

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

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

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.

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

A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country.

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.

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.

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%.