Quotes from Matthew Desmond

Ours was not always a nation of homeowners; the New Deal fashioned it so, particularly through the G.I. Bill of Rights.

I started a student organization that was basically designed to connect students with homeless folks. We visited them and sometimes brought food, but mostly we were there for swapping stories.

I had come to college believing in a story that if you worked hard, the American dream was reachable.

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

The standard of 'affordable' housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family's income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent.

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.

Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.

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.'

Most cities don't have a just cause eviction law. Most allow no cause evictions, as well as evictions for nonpayment.

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

The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about.

Even growing up the way I did, I was shocked by the level of poverty I saw as a college student. I thought the best way to understand it was to get close to it on the ground level.

Trying to learn from communities and engage with policy makers and community organizers all across the country is really important to me.

You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.

A lot of people didn't know just what eviction does to people, how it really sets their life on a different and much more difficult path, acting not like a condition of poverty but a cause of it.

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.

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.

I met a landlord who will pay you to move at the end of the week and let you use his van. That's a really nice kind of eviction. I met a landlord who will take your door off. There are 101 ways to move a family out.

When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

You do learn how to cope from those who are coping.

'Sag Harbor' brought me a new readership - it's a coming of age tale about growing up in the '80s.

Healthcare providers have helped me see that decent, safe housing can promote physical and mental wellness; and engaged citizens have shown me the civic potential of stable, vibrant blocks where neighbours know one another by name.

Home is the wellspring of personhood, where our identity takes root; where civic life begins. America is supposed to be a place where you can better yourself, your family, and your community.