Matthew Desmond Quotes

There are thousands on thousands in New York who have no assignable home.

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

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.

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

There is sometimes a tendency to assume that everyone in this great country has adequate housing. But when you go to certain places, certain neighborhoods, both urban and rural, you find out that's not the case, and I think we have to do much more.

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.

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.'

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

For far too many, the housing crisis has become a human crisis, with people being criminalised who should instead be protected as our most vulnerable citizens.

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.

I'm not going around touring the U.S. when I've got nowhere to live.

There are people much less fortunate than us, and I don't mean people hungry sleeping in the streets either.

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.

I was brought up as an only child, and we were very close. But when I was 14, we got evicted. We came home to a padlock, and I looked up at my mom and she was crying, and there was nothing to do.

We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.

How can you worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?

What a miserable place a city is for poor people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think we can fix poverty without fixing housing, and I don't think we can address housing without understanding landlords.

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.