Quotes from Matthew Desmond

Everywhere else, we are someone else, but at home, we remove our masks.

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.

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.

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.

Without the ability to plant roots and invest in your community or your school - because you're paying 60, 70, 80 percent of your income to rent - and eviction becomes something of an inevitability to you, it denies you certain freedoms.

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.

You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent.

Hundreds of data-mining companies sell landlords tenant-screening reports that list past evictions and court filings.

Libraries are not just places where people go read a book, but places where an immigrant goes to take English lessons and where folks out of a job search for community.

Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.

I saw people get fired after their eviction. But when I found that if you get evicted, your chances of losing your job increase by 20 percent, that's when it really hit home for me.

Kids increase people's risk of eviction.

I think there are ways that graduate students can fact-check their work. I think there are ways that we can do this that don't require massive amounts of resources.

It's true that eviction affects the young and the old, the sick and the able-bodied. It affects white folks and black folks and Hispanic folks and immigrants. If you spend time in housing court, you see a really diverse array of folks there.

Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities.

When I was confronted with just the bare facts of poverty and inequality in America, it always disturbed and confused me.

In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective.

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.

Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.

Eviction is much more an inevitability than a result of irresponsibility.

Do we believe housing is a right and that affordable housing is part of what it should mean to be an American? I say yes.

If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma.

If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma. And we're able to accept trauma with certain groups, like with soldiers, for instance - we understand that they face trauma and that trauma can be connected to things like depression or acts of violence later on in life.

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.