Matthew Desmond Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Matthew Desmond:

When you fight fires for a few seasons, you know what to expect. Your heart doesn't race as much as it did.

It's true that eviction affects the young and the old, the sick and the able-bodied. It affects white folks and black folks and Hispanic folks and immigrants. If you spend time in housing court, you see a really diverse array of folks there.

Matthew Desmond

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.

Matthew Desmond

Most poor families are living completely unassisted in a private rental market, devoting most of their income to housing. When you meet people who are spending 70, 80 percent of their income on rent, eviction becomes much more of an inevitability than the result of personal irresponsibility.

Matthew Desmond

You meet folks who are funny and really smart and persistent and loving that are confronting this thing we call poverty, which is just a shorthand for this way of life that holds you underwater. And you just wonder what our country would be if we allowed these people to flourish and reach their full potential.

Matthew Desmond

I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school.

Matthew Desmond

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.

Matthew Desmond

I don't think we can fix poverty without fixing housing, and I don't think we can address housing without understanding landlords.

Matthew Desmond

If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the canard about this rich country being unable to afford more.

Matthew Desmond

Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.

Matthew Desmond

It is very rare in the life of an intellectual to see your support network show up all at once.

Matthew Desmond

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.

Matthew Desmond

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.'

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

The high cost of housing is crushing poor families and sending them to a state of desperation.

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level.

Matthew Desmond

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.

Matthew Desmond

Trying to learn from communities and engage with policy makers and community organizers all across the country is really important to me.

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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.

Matthew Desmond

All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes.

Matthew Desmond

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.

Matthew Desmond

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.

Matthew Desmond

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.

Matthew Desmond

Everywhere else, we are someone else, but at home, we remove our masks.

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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.

Matthew Desmond

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.

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

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.

Matthew Desmond

I love Milwaukee, the rust belt. It's a very special part of America that's full of promise but also full of pain, where poverty is acute.

Matthew Desmond

In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves.

Matthew Desmond

The texture and hardship of poverty and eviction is something that I think left the deepest impression on me, and I hope that I try to convey a little bit of that to the reader.

Matthew Desmond

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

Matthew Desmond

Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques - from overdraft fees to student loans subsidizing for-profit colleges - specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor. This problem generally goes unrecognized by policy makers.

Matthew Desmond