Matthew Desmond

“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.'”

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

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

“Families who get evicted tend to live in worse housing than they did before, and they live in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and higher crime rates than they did before.”

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

“Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.”

“it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”

“For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetually behind; and many poor tenants would be perpetually behind because their rent was too high.”

“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.”

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

“Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.”

“We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.”

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

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

“Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market.”

“You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They “helped get rid of the riffraff,” some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.In years past, renters opposed landlords and saw themselves as a “class” with shared interests and a unified purpose. During the early twentieth century, tenants organized against evictions and unsanitary conditions. When landlords raised rents too often or too steeply, tenants went so far as to stage rent strikes. Strikers joined together to withhold rent and form picket lines, risking eviction, arrest, and beatings by hired thugs. They were not an especially radical bunch, these strikers. Most were ordinary mothers and fathers who believed landlords were entitled to modest rent increases and fair profits, but not “price gouging.” In New York City, the great rent wars of the Roaring Twenties forced a state legislature to impose rent controls that remain the country’s strongest to this day.Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience—this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision.”