“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.”

American sociologist

Matthew Desmond is an American sociologist and professor at Princeton University. He is known for his work on housing, poverty, and inequality, and for leading the Eviction Lab there. At Princeton, he serves as the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology and as principal investigator of the Eviction Lab. He was formerly the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.