Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.
Matthew Desmond
I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.
If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.
I don't think we can fix poverty without fixing housing, and I don't think we can address housing without understanding landlords.
We can start with housing, the sturdiest of footholds for economic mobility. A national affordable housing program would be an anti-poverty effort, human capital investment, community improvement plan, and public health initiative all rolled into one.
If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.
All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes.
We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.
Do we believe housing is a right and that affordable housing is part of what it should mean to be an American? I say yes.
Poverty is a relationship that involves a lot of folks, rich and poor alike. I was looking for something that brought a lot of different people in a room. Eviction does that, embroils landlords and tenants, lawyers and social workers.
I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart.
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.
The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about.
Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.
Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health, not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.
Home is the center of life. It's the wellspring of personhood. It's where we say we're ourselves.
The standard of 'affordable' housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family's income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent.
Home is the wellspring of personhood, where our identity takes root; where civic life begins. America is supposed to be a place where you can better yourself, your family, and your community.
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.
If you look at the American Household Survey, the last time we did that in 2013, renters in over 2.8 million homes thought they would be evicted soon.
The poor don't want some small life. They don't want to game the system. They want to contribute, and they want to thrive. But poverty reduces people born for better things.
Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.
I felt that writing about peoples' lives was a heck of a responsibility, and I wanted to know them in a deep way.
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.
Kids increase people's risk of eviction.
Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.
I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.
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.
Trying to learn from communities and engage with policy makers and community organizers all across the country is really important to me.
Tenants don't have any right to court-appointed attorneys in civil court, so they're either facing their landlord - or his or her attorney - alone, or they just don't show up. That reflects a severe power imbalance.
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.
I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn't only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, 'Shoot, eviction does that.'
Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.
If eviction has these massive consequences that we all pay for, a very smart use of public funds would be to invest in legal services for folks facing eviction.
If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling.
Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.
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.
Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.
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.
Moms that get evicted are depressed and have higher rates of depressive symptoms two years later. That has to affect their interactions with their kids and their sense of happiness. You add all that together, and it's just really obvious to me that eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.
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.
Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial.
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?
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.
Since evictions go through court, it has a record that comes with it, and many landlords that I spend time with use that as a big screening mechanism. And that's really the reason, we think, families are pushed into worse housing and worse neighborhoods after their evictions.
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.
Eviction comes with a record. Just like a criminal record can hurt you in the jobs market, eviction can hurt you in the housing market. A lot of landlords turn folks away who have an eviction, and a lot of public housing authorities do the same.
There is a reason so many Americans choose to develop their net worth through homeownership: It is a proven wealth builder and savings compeller.
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.
The face of America's eviction epidemic is a mom with kids.
