Matthew Desmond Quotes

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

- Matthew Desmond

The standard of 'affordable' housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family's income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

I started a student organization that was basically designed to connect students with homeless folks. We visited them and sometimes brought food, but mostly we were there for swapping stories.

- 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

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

- Matthew Desmond

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.'

- 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

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.

- Matthew Desmond

Between 2009 and 2011, more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were displaced involuntarily, whether by formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation.

- 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

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- 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

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.

- Matthew Desmond

Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- 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

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

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- 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

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.

- 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

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.

- Matthew Desmond

Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques - from overdraft fees to student loans subsidizing for-profit colleges - specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor. This problem generally goes unrecognized by policy makers.

- Matthew Desmond

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

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

- 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

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

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.

- Matthew Desmond

Home is the center of life. It's the wellspring of personhood. It's where we say we're ourselves.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- 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

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

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

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

- 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

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

You do learn how to cope from those who are coping.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- 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

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

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

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

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

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%.

- 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

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

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.

- 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

If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions.

- 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

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

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

Eviction comes with a record. Just like a criminal record can hurt you in the jobs market, eviction can hurt you in the housing market. A lot of landlords turn folks away who have an eviction, and a lot of public housing authorities do the same.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- 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

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

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.

- 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

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn't only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, 'Shoot, eviction does that.'

- 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

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

- Matthew Desmond

Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.

- 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

American greatness can be further unlocked if opportunity is expanded to all people within its borders.

- Matthew Desmond

An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

Evictions used to be rare in this country. They used to draw crowds. There are scenes in literature where you can come upon an eviction - like, in 'Invisible Man' there's the famous eviction scene in Harlem, and people are gathered around, and they move the family back in.

- Matthew Desmond

I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart.

- Matthew Desmond

Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street.

- Matthew Desmond

Moms that get evicted are depressed and have higher rates of depressive symptoms two years later. That has to affect their interactions with their kids and their sense of happiness. You add all that together, and it's just really obvious to me that eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

There is a reason so many Americans choose to develop their net worth through homeownership: It is a proven wealth builder and savings compeller.

- 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

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.'

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.

- Matthew Desmond

You lose your home, you are much more likely to lose your job the year following. The reason for that comes back to the bandwidth problem: You're so focused on this event that you're making mistakes at work; you can relocate further from work, which can increase your tardiness and absenteeism and cause you to lose your job.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- 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

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

- Matthew Desmond

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

Kids increase people's risk of eviction.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

'Sag Harbor' brought me a new readership - it's a coming of age tale about growing up in the '80s.

- 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

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

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

My dad was a preacher.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

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

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

- 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

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

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.

- Matthew Desmond

Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.

- Matthew Desmond

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?

- Matthew Desmond

All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- 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

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.

- Matthew Desmond

If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma.

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- 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

Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nation's racial wealth gap.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- 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

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

- Matthew Desmond

I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.

- Matthew Desmond

I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.

- Matthew Desmond

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

Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling.

- 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

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

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

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

- Matthew Desmond

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.

- Matthew Desmond

Housing is a social issue: how we live and where we live.

- Matthew Desmond

Do we believe housing is a right and that affordable housing is part of what it should mean to be an American? I say yes.

- Matthew Desmond

The church should lead on issues of housing and affordability.

- Matthew Desmond

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

- 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

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

- Matthew Desmond