Quotes by Matthew Desmond

The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets. We say that at home, we can “be ourselves.” Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home, we remove our masks. The home is the wellspring of personhood. It is where our identity takes root and blossoms, where as children, we imagine, play, and question, and as adolescents, we retreat and try. As we grow older, we hope to settle into a place to raise a family or pursue work. When we try to understand ourselves, we often begin by considering the kind of home in which we were raised.

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 theres the famous eviction scene in Harlem, and people are gathered around, and they move the family back in.

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.

Poverty is not just a sad accident, but its also a result of the fact that some people make a lot of money off low-income families and directly contribute to their poverty.

There were evictions that I saw that I know Ill 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 face of Americas eviction epidemic is a mom with kids.

Why young men from the country become firefighters is hard to explain to people who are not from the country. For most of us, its not about the rush, which fades with time, or the paycheck. We could earn more working for the railroad or a car dealership. I figure its about the land.

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.

Home is where children find safety and security, where we find our identities, where citizenship starts. It usually starts with believing youre part of a community, and that is essential to having a stable home.

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.

There is a deep connection, when were 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.

National data on evictions arent collected, although national data on foreclosures are. And so if anyone wants to, kind of, get to know any statistical research about evictions, they have to really dig in the annals of legal records.

My dad was a preacher.