Matthew Desmond Quotes

Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.

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

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.

After school, I got a job in a shop in Hollywood and shared an apartment with a friend. I promptly lost my job and got evicted from my apartment, and that happened several times.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Eviction often leads to a disruption in critical services like Medicaid and nutrition assistance when families need them most.

I grew up in constant fear of eviction.

We got evicted from our house in Guildford. We were chucked out and had nowhere to go. We ended up in social housing. And it was very hard for my mum. My brothers were five and three.

When I was 5, some financial things happened, and I moved seven times in a year. We moved from apartment to apartment, sometimes living with friends. My mom would always say, 'Don't get comfortable, because we may not be here long.'

Being poor sucks... It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month.

The Minister of Lands, Sir, got his ideas as a boy when he saw the poor people [of Scotland] evicted from their houses in the most cruel manner and unable to get a place for their feet to stand upon except they went to cemeteries.

There’s been an economic war going on in this country and the middle class and the poor have been losing..

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

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.

My parents were dealing with evictions and repossessions and electricity getting shut off, and I just realized that I had to get it together.

I've lived in so many different towns - Guttenberg, Union City, West New York, Jersey City. We didn't have a lot of money, and we'd get kicked out of places a lot.

In my sophomore year of high school, I watched my friend Loretta leave in a U-Haul headed for Oakland. She and her mom had been tenants in a nearby apartment, forced out by rent they couldn't afford anymore.

For many years, I didn't have a home.

There is no peace in poverty