Quotes About Matthew Desmond

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Eviction comes with a record, too, and just as a criminal record can bar you from receiving certain benefits or getting a foothold in the labor market, the record of eviction comes with consequences as well. It can bar you from getting good housing in a good neighborhood.

Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations.

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.

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.