Quotes from Matthew Desmond

National data on evictions aren't collected, although national data on foreclosures are. And so if anyone wants to, kind of, get to know any statistical research about evictions, they have to really dig in the annals of legal records.

I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this. I understand that poverty is never just poverty. It's often this collection of maladies, this compounded adversity. I'm not naive about the problem. But I think that stable, steady housing is one of the surest footholds we could have on the road to financial stability.

I have always been really troubled by the amount of poverty in America. Americans are matched in their rich democracy with the depth and expanse of poverty. That's really always unsettled me.

When we think of entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare immediately come to mind. But by any fair standard, the holy trinity of United States social policy should also include the mortgage-interest deduction - an enormous benefit that has also become politically untouchable.

I teach at Harvard, and focusing on understanding this problem on a national level is a big priority of mine right now - where evictions are going up and down, what cities are actually instituting policies that work, what housing insecurity is doing to our cities, neighbourhoods, our kids.

I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.

A lot of the stories about urban America tend to be written on the margins. We focus a lot on these big global cities - New York, San Francisco - or we focus on cities that are having the toughest time - Detroit, Newark, Camden.

I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.

The home is the center of life - a refuge from the grind of work, pressure of school, menace of the streets, a place to be ourselves.

An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event.

Evictions cause job loss. Because it's such a destabilizing, stressful event, they lose their footing in the labor market. It has big impacts on people's health, especially mental health.

Just strictly from a business standpoint, kids are a liability to landlords, and they actually provoke evictions.

Child Protection Services can get all up in your business if you have kids. Just strictly from a business standpoint, kids are a liability to landlords, and they actually provoke evictions.

Families, when they get a housing voucher, they move a lot less. They move into better neighborhoods. Their kids go to the same school more consistently. Their kids have more food, and they get stronger. There are massive returns.

There is a deep connection, when we're talking about certain market forces and a legal structure that inhibits low or moderate income families from getting ahead. Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.

When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up?

You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.

The cost of evictions varies a lot, but it could be for landlords an expensive process as well. Among the costs for landlords as well is the emotional costs of an eviction.

The face of America's eviction epidemic is a mom with kids.