Quotes from Matthew Desmond

Home is the center of life. It's the wellspring of personhood. It's where we say we're ourselves.

My dad was a preacher.

You lose your home, you are much more likely to lose your job the year following. The reason for that comes back to the bandwidth problem: You're so focused on this event that you're making mistakes at work; you can relocate further from work, which can increase your tardiness and absenteeism and cause you to lose your job.

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.

This country has so much wealth and so much poverty, and that seemed wrong to me. 'Evicted' was my Ph.D. dissertation.

Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.

Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques - from overdraft fees to student loans subsidizing for-profit colleges - specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor. This problem generally goes unrecognized by policy makers.

I love Milwaukee, the rust belt. It's a very special part of America that's full of promise but also full of pain, where poverty is acute.

There is a reason so many Americans choose to develop their net worth through homeownership: It is a proven wealth builder and savings compeller.

Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.

When you fight fires for a few seasons, you know what to expect. Your heart doesn't race as much as it did.

A fire in a forest is alive with terror and power.

Eviction comes with a record. Just like a criminal record can hurt you in the jobs market, eviction can hurt you in the housing market. A lot of landlords turn folks away who have an eviction, and a lot of public housing authorities do the same.

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.

In February 1932, the 'Times' published an account of community resistance to the eviction of three families in the Bronx, observing, 'Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000.'

Since evictions go through court, it has a record that comes with it, and many landlords that I spend time with use that as a big screening mechanism. And that's really the reason, we think, families are pushed into worse housing and worse neighborhoods after their evictions.

Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today.

Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.

The texture and hardship of poverty and eviction is something that I think left the deepest impression on me, and I hope that I try to convey a little bit of that to the reader.

There were evictions that I saw that I know I'll 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.

Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.

I want my work to influence public conversation, to turn heads, and to bear witness to this problem that's raging in our cities. If journalism helps me with that, I'll draw on journalism... and I'm not going to worry too much if academics get troubled over that distinction.

I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty.

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.