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
If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.
Public-sector union organisers have told me about how firefighters, police officers, and nurses can no longer afford to live in the cities they serve and protect.
Eviction reveals people's vulnerability and desperation as well as their ingenuity and guts.
Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial.
Eviction is much more an inevitability than a result of irresponsibility.
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?
You lose your home, you are much more likely to lose your job the year following. The reason for that comes back to the bandwidth problem: You're so focused on this event that you're making mistakes at work; you can relocate further from work, which can increase your tardiness and absenteeism and cause you to lose your job.
Kids increase people's risk of eviction.
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.
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.
What we're seeing is that even in high poverty neighborhoods, the average cost of renting is quickly approaching the total income of welfare recipients and low wage workers.
Hundreds of data-mining companies sell landlords tenant-screening reports that list past evictions and court filings.
All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes.
I saw people get fired after their eviction. But when I found that if you get evicted, your chances of losing your job increase by 20 percent, that's when it really hit home for me.
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.
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.
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.
Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11% reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31% of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44.7%.
Since the publication of 'Evicted', I have had countless conversations with concerned families across America. Teachers in under-served communities have told me about high classroom turnover rates, which hinder students' ability to reach their full potential.
Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street.
In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective.
These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.
If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma. And we're able to accept trauma with certain groups, like with soldiers, for instance - we understand that they face trauma and that trauma can be connected to things like depression or acts of violence later on in life.
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.
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.
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.
Some white Milwakeeans still referred to the North side as 'the cire', as they did in the 1960s, and if they ventured into it, they saw street after street of sagging duplexes, fading murals, twenty-four hour daycares, and corner stores with 'WIC Accepted Here' signs.
National data on evictions aren't collected, although national data on foreclosures are. And so if anyone wants to, kind of, get to know any statistical research about evictions, they have to really dig in the annals of legal records.
In February 1932, the 'Times' published an account of community resistance to the eviction of three families in the Bronx, observing, 'Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000.'
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.
You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent.
Evictions used to be rare in this country. They used to draw crowds. There are scenes in literature where you can come upon an eviction - like, in 'Invisible Man' there's the famous eviction scene in Harlem, and people are gathered around, and they move the family back in.
We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.
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.
Healthcare providers have helped me see that decent, safe housing can promote physical and mental wellness; and engaged citizens have shown me the civic potential of stable, vibrant blocks where neighbours know one another by name.
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.
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.
A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country.
Children didn't shield families from eviction: They exposed them to it.
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.
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.
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.
'Sag Harbor' brought me a new readership - it's a coming of age tale about growing up in the '80s.
Housing is a social issue: how we live and where we live.
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 riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today.
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.
There is a deep connection, when we're talking about certain market forces and a legal structure that inhibits low or moderate income families from getting ahead. Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.
When I left Milwaukee, and I had all these stories. I felt so responsible for people. It's a heck of a thing to do, to try to write someone's story.
