Jack Monroe Quotes

I grew up in a two-bedroom house with my grandfather, my mom and dad and four kids. I slept on the couch or on the floor, and I always wanted to have my own space.

I grew up in Burbank - but not the Burbank of valet parking and TV studios. In the late 1950s, there was a small apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue that rented mostly to families on welfare. I lived there from age 3 to 11 and again from 14 to 18 with my mother, Shirley, and my younger sister, Toni.

I was born in Jerusalem in 1939 to a poor family that shared a rented four-room apartment with two additional families and their children.

I grew up in Georgia where my parents, little brother Zurab and I shared a flat with my paternal grandparents and two uncles in the capital, Tbilisi. Times were hard and the country was racked by civil war.

I grew up in a commissioned house in the next suburb over, Mount Abbot. It was a two-bedroom house with me, my brother, and my two sisters. Mum and Dad slept in the lounge, and we didn't have wallpaper.

We lived in a flat that you could pretty much fit in my current kitchen. No wonder people drink! I can't understand why they don't throw themselves off the balconies.

If I close my eyes, I can remember the first apartment where I lived with my family in Newark, N.J., in the late 1930s. The rooms were lined up like train cars - you had to go through one to get to another - and there wasn't any heat or hot water.

This is kind of a uniquely New York experience, but when you can't afford an apartment nicer than the place you're renting, there's something so inherently depressing about it.

New York City is an amazing place to raise children.

I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.

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

I grew up in a semi-slum area in Gavipuram, Guttahalli.

I grew up in a very large family in a very small house. I never slept alone until after I was married.

In the house in Beverly Hills where our four children grew up, living conditions were a few thousand times improved over the old tenement on New York's East 93rd Street we Marx Brothers called home.

The first eight years of my life, we lived in an abandoned diner - we were basically squatters.

Part of my childhood was spent in Sydney and part in rural New South Wales, at Armidale.

More than a billion people in the world live in slums today, roughly one out of every three inhabitants of cities.

But where else should they sleep?

Not only does filth, overcrowding, lack of privacy and domesticity, lack of ventilation and lighting, and absence of supervision and of sanitary regulation still characterize the greater number of the tenements; but they are built to a greater height in stories

Disease is largely a removable evil. It continues to afflict humanity, not only because of incomplete knowledge of its causes and lack of individual and public hygiene, but also because it is extensively fostered by harsh economic and industrial conditions and by wretched housing in congested communities.

It is not squalid people who produce the squalid housing; it is the squalid housing that makes squalid people.

… many social problems stem from poor housing.

It is one thing to listen in perfunctory fashion to tales of overcrowding tenements, and it is quite another actually to see what that overcrowding means, some hot summer night, by even a single inspection during the hours of darkness.

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

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