Top 34 Matthew Desmond Quotes
#1. it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.
Matthew Desmond
#3. We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.
Matthew Desmond
#4. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.
Matthew Desmond
#5. Our current state of affairs reduces to poverty people born for better things.
Matthew Desmond
#6. By and large, the poor do not want some small life. They don't want to game the system or eke out an existence; they want to thrive and contribute.
Matthew Desmond
#7. If you count all forms of involuntary displacement - formal and informal evictions, landlord foreclosures, building condemnations - you discover that between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move.
Matthew Desmond
#8. Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on our next generation.
Matthew Desmond
#9. If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.
Matthew Desmond
#10. Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.
Matthew Desmond
#11. Eviction reveals people's vulnerability and desperation, as well as their ingenuity and guts.
Matthew Desmond
#12. I cannot help you. So, I will find you unworthy of help.
Matthew Desmond
#13. What else is a nation but a patchwork of cities and towns; cities and towns a patchwork of neighborhoods; and neighborhoods a patchwork of homes?
Matthew Desmond
#14. It was not that low-income renters didn't know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them.
Matthew Desmond
#15. Every condition exists," Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, "simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum." Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.
Matthew Desmond
#16. Establishing publicly funded legal services for low-income families in housing court would be a cost-effective measure that would prevent homelessness, decrease evictions, and give poor families a fair shake.
Matthew Desmond
#17. One's sovereignty over the land is expressed most powerfully in the act of banishment. Perhaps the first eviction recorded in human history was Adam and Eve's.
Matthew Desmond
#18. In 1930, the death rate for Milwaukee's blacks was nearly 60 percent higher than the citywide rate, due in large part to poor housing conditions.
Matthew Desmond
#19. Landlords took the side streets, typically not in their Saab or Audi but in their "rent collector," some oil-leaking, rusted-out van or truck that hauled around extension cords, ladders, maybe a loaded pistol, plumbing snakes, toolboxes, a can of Mace, nail guns, and other necessities.
Matthew Desmond
#20. The profits were staggering. In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landlord simply replied, "That's why I bought the building.
Matthew Desmond
#22. Universal housing programs have been successfully implemented all over the developed world. In countries that have such programs, every single family with an income below a certain level who meets basic program requirements has a right to housing assistance.
Matthew Desmond
#23. Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on.
Matthew Desmond
#24. For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetually behind; and many poor tenants would be perpetually behind because their rent was too high.
Matthew Desmond
#25. Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.
Matthew Desmond
#26. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.
Matthew Desmond
#27. Every year in this country, people are evicted from their homes not by the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands but by the millions.
Matthew Desmond
#28. There was always something worse than the trailer park, always room to drop lower. Residents
Matthew Desmond
#29. Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle. Eviction was such a process.
Matthew Desmond
#30. When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice, full of "all sorts of shipwrecked humanity," they lost confidence in its political capacity.8
Matthew Desmond
#31. Most poor people in America were like Arleen: they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.
Matthew Desmond
#32. Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market. 24 Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation.
Matthew Desmond
#33. No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.
Matthew Desmond
#34. Still, I wonder sometimes what we are asking when we ask if findings apply elsewhere...Maybe what we are really asking when we ask if a study is "generalizable"is: Can it really be this bad everywhere? Or maybe we're asking: Do I really have to pay attention to this problem?
Matthew Desmond
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