Matthew Desmond Quotes

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.

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.

All New Yorkers have the right to decent housing, regardless of income and rent.

Fair and affordable housing is a basic right for all New Yorkers and all Americans.

For families to access affordable housing, they often need legal representation that takes their side against abusive landlords.

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

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

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

We want to make sure that anyone facing eviction has access to high-quality legal representation.

In April 2006, a Dutch court ordered that I leave my safe-home that I was renting from the State. The judge concluded that my neighbors had a right to argue that they felt unsafe because of my presence in the building.

When you're unemployed for six months or a year, it is hard to qualify for a lease, so even the option of relocating to find a job is often off the table.

Every American will be given a decent, safe and affordable home.

Why shouldn't public housing be run by the tenants?

The Negro is the same as any other minority group he is clannish and tends to select neighbors who are of the same background and race. Unless other builders opened housing to all, I could not afford the decline in sales that would result if Negroes enjoyed equal access to my houses.

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 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.

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.

Private landlords as well as public landlords are free to discriminate against people with criminal records for the rest of their lives. You come out of prison, and where are you expected to go?

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

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.

There's no way to understand housing as it exists today without federal policy.

Once you've acquired a criminal record, you can be discriminated against legally in employment, housing, and access to education and public benefits. You're relegated to a permanent second-class status, forever a 'criminal.' Inflicting this amount of unnecessary pain and suffering is not cheap.

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

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

Public housing is off-limits to you if you have been convicted of a felony. For a minimum of five years, you are deemed ineligible for public housing once you've been branded a felon. Discrimination in private housing market's perfectly legal.