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
Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.
If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.
Libraries are not just places where people go read a book, but places where an immigrant goes to take English lessons and where folks out of a job search for community.
Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.
No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.
Poverty is not just a sad accident, but it's also a result of the fact that some people make a lot of money off low-income families and directly contribute to their poverty.
I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.
A lot of the stories about urban America tend to be written on the margins. We focus a lot on these big global cities - New York, San Francisco - or we focus on cities that are having the toughest time - Detroit, Newark, Camden.
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 see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty.
If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions.
Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.
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.
Everywhere else, we are someone else, but at home, we remove our masks.
I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this. I understand that poverty is never just poverty. It's often this collection of maladies, this compounded adversity. I'm not naive about the problem. But I think that stable, steady housing is one of the surest footholds we could have on the road to financial stability.
I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.
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.
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.
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.
Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities.
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.
When you fight fires for a few seasons, you know what to expect. Your heart doesn't race as much as it did.
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 teach at Harvard, and focusing on understanding this problem on a national level is a big priority of mine right now - where evictions are going up and down, what cities are actually instituting policies that work, what housing insecurity is doing to our cities, neighbourhoods, our kids.
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.
Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.
I felt that writing about peoples' lives was a heck of a responsibility, and I wanted to know them in a deep way.
Trying to learn from communities and engage with policy makers and community organizers all across the country is really important to me.
The face of America's eviction epidemic is a mom with kids.
American greatness can be further unlocked if opportunity is expanded to all people within its borders.
Home is the center of life. It's the wellspring of personhood. It's where we say we're ourselves.
You have to understand the role the landlords are playing in shaping neighborhoods, how they potentially expand or reduce inequality, how their profits are a direct result of some tenant's poverty.
If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling.
Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.
If I wrote in Jacob Riis' time, I'd be writing about teeming slums in our cities and kids dying of tuberculosis or outhouses in Philadelphia or kids losing their toes because they were living in homes without heat. He took on a battle in 'The Battle with the Slums' - and we won.
I had come to college believing in a story that if you worked hard, the American dream was reachable.
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.'
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.
I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school.
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.
Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.
Most cities don't have a just cause eviction law. Most allow no cause evictions, as well as evictions for nonpayment.
The high cost of housing is crushing poor families and sending them to a state of desperation.
The church should lead on issues of housing and affordability.
You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.
A fire in a forest is alive with terror and power.
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.
I started a student organization that was basically designed to connect students with homeless folks. We visited them and sometimes brought food, but mostly we were there for swapping stories.
I met a landlord who will pay you to move at the end of the week and let you use his van. That's a really nice kind of eviction. I met a landlord who will take your door off. There are 101 ways to move a family out.
