London Breed Quotes

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.

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.

As a country, we can do better. Our home should be a source of stability, not insecurity. This issue is personal for me... even with a steady paycheck, I couldn't pay rent.

Every day, families in the United States face the stark choice between a roof over their heads and food on the table. Buying health insurance, owning a home, and saving up for college are just too far out of their reach.

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

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.

Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.

I know what it's like to be on public assistance and to be unemployed. And I know what it's like to be evicted.

I know people who have been without a home for ages, and lots of my friends are sofa surfing because they are in between jobs or saving for degrees and other studies - paying £500 rent every month is just not feasible for them.

Obsession with the market seem to prevent ministers looking at the huge problem and all its ramifications in health, education and employment that come from the housing insecurity that too many face.

Many of my friends and family are scratching it out somewhere decidedly south of the ever widening gap between the haves and have nots, looking at losing their homes, colleges they can't afford and healthcare they can't avail themselves of.

I didn't really have an interest in politics when I first entered the workforce. What I wanted to do was help people who grew up like me. When I was a kid growing up in Tucson, my father lost his job and we lost everything - including our home. We lived in an abandoned gas station for two years until we were able to get back on our feet.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was a young mother with a dependent. I went from nice flat and fire service job to cold and hungry with a child. I lived rough for two years, with six months relying on the food bank.

I was one of the poorest people in America.

None of us want to ever face a choice between putting food on the table or paying rent.

The holidays are a rough time for the homeless, but it's a year-round problem we have to solve.

I was working at Lowes and Target, then FedEx, and still did not have enough money to pay rent on my own.

I squatted for most of my adult life. I'm not condoning squatting; it was just the only way I could do what I wanted to do. I didn't have, you know, a trust fund or parents that could help out.

I have way more experience being poor than I do having money.