Michael Bennet Quotes

Eviction is a cause, not just a condition of poverty.

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.

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

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 is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.

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.

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.

In my own constituency, the benefit cap has had the effect of social cleansing: of people receiving benefit, but the benefit is capped; therefore, they can't meet the rent levels charged and are forced to move. It's devastating for children, devastating for the family and very bad for the community as a whole.

There are more than 300,000 families in the Gulf region that lost their homes and are waiting for peace of mind. The hurricane exposed the sad reality of poverty in America. We saw, in all its horrific detail, the vulnerabilities of living in inadequate housing and the heartbreak of losing one's home.

I grew up homeless, you know, lived in and out of U-Haul trucks and, you know, apartment houses, friends.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.