Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today.
If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people’s live and neighborhoods, it’s pretty troubling.
I think there are ways that graduate students can fact-check their work. I think there are ways that we can do this that don’t require massive amounts of resources.
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.
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.
Home is the center of life. It’s the wellspring of personhood. It’s where we say we’re ourselves.
All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes.
The church should lead on issues of housing and affordability.
I felt that writing about peoples’ lives was a heck of a responsibility, and I wanted to know them in a deep way.
Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations.
Kids increase people’s risk of eviction.
Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.
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.
I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart.
I teach at Harvard, and focusing on understanding this problem on a national level is a big priority of mine right now – where evictions are going up and down, what cities are actually instituting policies that work, what housing insecurity is doing to our cities, neighbourhoods, our kids.
Families, when they get a housing voucher, they move a lot less. They move into better neighborhoods. Their kids go to the same school more consistently. Their kids have more food, and they get stronger. There are massive returns.
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.
If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions.
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.
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.
There is a reason so many Americans choose to develop their net worth through homeownership: It is a proven wealth builder and savings compeller.
When you ask people why they were evicted, the big reason is nonpayment of rent. They can’t afford to keep a roof over their heads. Utilities are a big part of the story too, while the third leg on the table is the lack of government help with housing.
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.
American greatness can be further unlocked if opportunity is expanded to all people within its borders.
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.
I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.
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.
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.
Why young men from the country become firefighters is hard to explain to people who are not from the country. For most of us, it’s not about the rush, which fades with time, or the paycheck. We could earn more working for the railroad or a car dealership. I figure it’s about the land.
A lot flows from the question: Is having decent, stable housing part of what it means to live in this country? And I think we should answer ‘yes.’
Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.
The face of America’s eviction epidemic is a mom with kids.
Children didn’t shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.
In February 1932, the ‘Times’ published an account of community resistance to the eviction of three families in the Bronx, observing, ‘Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000.’
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.
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.
Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street.
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.
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.
A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential: its ability to work together to change the community and change their lives.
Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities.
I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.
Hundreds of data-mining companies sell landlords tenant-screening reports that list past evictions and court filings.
If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it’s not pretty – it’s full of trauma. And we’re able to accept trauma with certain groups, like with soldiers, for instance – we understand that they face trauma and that trauma can be connected to things like depression or acts of violence later on in life.
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