Quotes from Matthew Desmond

I'm from a small town, and I thought I would be a lawyer.

This was what a lot of us, mainly young men, did in the summers in northern Arizona. This is how I put myself through college. I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school.

Why young men from the country become firefighters is hard to explain to people who are not from the country. For most of us, it's 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 it's about the land.

Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial.

When I left Milwaukee, and I had all these stories. I felt so responsible for people. It's a heck of a thing to do, to try to write someone's story.

Between 2009 and 2011, more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were displaced involuntarily, whether by formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation.

If I wrote in Jacob Riis' time, I'd be writing about teeming slums in our cities and kids dying of tuberculosis or outhouses in Philadelphia or kids losing their toes because they were living in homes without heat. He took on a battle in 'The Battle with the Slums' - and we won.

Some white Milwakeeans still referred to the North side as 'the cire', as they did in the 1960s, and if they ventured into it, they saw street after street of sagging duplexes, fading murals, twenty-four hour daycares, and corner stores with 'WIC Accepted Here' signs.

If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.

Arguably, the families most at need of housing assistance are systematically denied it because they're stamped with an eviction record. Moms and kids are bearing the brunt of those consequences.

All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes.

Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.

Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.

If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the canard about this rich country being unable to afford more.

You have to understand the role the landlords are playing in shaping neighborhoods, how they potentially expand or reduce inequality, how their profits are a direct result of some tenant's poverty.

I don't think we can fix poverty without fixing housing, and I don't think we can address housing without understanding landlords.

If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions.

I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart.

A lot flows from the question: Is having decent, stable housing part of what it means to live in this country? And I think we should answer 'yes.'

The face of the eviction epidemic is moms and kids, especially poor moms from predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods.

Public-sector union organisers have told me about how firefighters, police officers, and nurses can no longer afford to live in the cities they serve and protect.

I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.

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

I think I've read all of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is a lot. He started off with comprehensive field work in Philadelphia, publishing a book in 1899 called 'The Philadelphia Negro'. It was this wonderful combination of clear statistical data and ethnographic data.