Matthew Desmond Quotes

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.

There is plenty of affordable housing —it is simply occupied by the wrong people.... The problem in New York is not high rents, but low incomes.

If you have someone who is paying 88 percent of her income on rent, and we have laws that allow a landlord to evict a tenant who falls behind under those circumstances, eviction becomes an inevitability.

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.

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.

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.

It takes a good amount of time and money to establish a home. Eviction can erase all that.

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.

There is a deep connection, when we're talking about certain market forces and a legal structure that inhibits low or moderate income families from getting ahead. Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.

Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.

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.

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.

Housing insecurity isn't just an abstract point of policy for me. I've lived it.

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.

The city ... is involved in the fight for its life. One of the critical battlegrounds is the struggle to preserve middle class residential neighborhoods.

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

Eviction comes with a record, too, and just as a criminal record can bar you from receiving certain benefits or getting a foothold in the labor market, the record of eviction comes with consequences as well. It can bar you from getting good housing in a good neighborhood.

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

We can start with housing, the sturdiest of footholds for economic mobility. A national affordable housing program would be an anti-poverty effort, human capital investment, community improvement plan, and public health initiative all rolled into one.

I think, in this country, if you work 40 hours a week, and you work hard, you ought to be able to afford an apartment somewhere.

What we're seeing is that even in high poverty neighborhoods, the average cost of renting is quickly approaching the total income of welfare recipients and low wage workers.

I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this. I understand that poverty is never just poverty. It's often this collection of maladies, this compounded adversity. I'm not naive about the problem. But I think that stable, steady housing is one of the surest footholds we could have on the road to financial stability.

A stable and affordable home is fundamental to economic security.

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.

Moms that get evicted are depressed and have higher rates of depressive symptoms two years later. That has to affect their interactions with their kids and their sense of happiness. You add all that together, and it's just really obvious to me that eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.