Eviction causes loss. You lose not only your home but also your possessions, which are thrown onto the curb or taken by movers, and often you can't keep up payments.
— 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.
Ours was not always a nation of homeowners; the New Deal fashioned it so, particularly through the G.I. Bill of Rights.
Many times when we are talking about displacement, we talk about it within the frame of gentrification, which focuses on transitioning neighborhoods. But man, every city I've looked at, Milwaukee included, most evictions are right there, smack dab in ungentrifying, poor, segregated communities.
Eviction comes with a record, too, and just as a criminal record can bar you from receiving certain benefits or getting a foothold in the labor market, the record of eviction comes with consequences as well. It can bar you from getting good housing in a good neighborhood.
It is very rare in the life of an intellectual to see your support network show up all at once.
If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma.
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.
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.
I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.
There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.
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.
You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.
Without the ability to plant roots and invest in your community or your school - because you're paying 60, 70, 80 percent of your income to rent - and eviction becomes something of an inevitability to you, it denies you certain freedoms.
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.
This country has so much wealth and so much poverty, and that seemed wrong to me. 'Evicted' was my Ph.D. dissertation.
A lot of us who grew up in the country, hunting and fishing, being very familiar with the woods and dirt roads, have the skill set you need to fight fire.
If we continue to tolerate this level of poverty in our cities, and go along with eviction as commonplace in poor neighborhoods, it's not for a lack of resources. It will be a lack of something else.
There were evictions that I saw that I know I'll never forget. In one case, the sheriff and the movers came up on a house full of children. The mom had passed away, and the children had just gone on living there. And the sheriff executed the eviction order - moved the kids' stuff out on the street on a cold, rainy day.
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.
Just strictly from a business standpoint, kids are a liability to landlords, and they actually provoke evictions.
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.
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.
In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves.
Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.
African American women, and moms in particular, are evicted at disproportionately high rates.
You do learn how to cope from those who are coping.
An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event.
Even growing up the way I did, I was shocked by the level of poverty I saw as a college student. I thought the best way to understand it was to get close to it on the ground level.
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 think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart.
I left college with a deep sense that I needed to understand poverty more.
I'm from a small town, and I thought I would be a lawyer.
Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.
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.
Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nation's racial wealth gap.
There is a reason so many Americans choose to develop their net worth through homeownership: It is a proven wealth builder and savings compeller.
Arguably, the families most at need of housing assistance are systematically denied it because they're stamped with an eviction record. Moms and kids are bearing the brunt of those consequences.
I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.
A lot of people didn't know just what eviction does to people, how it really sets their life on a different and much more difficult path, acting not like a condition of poverty but a cause of it.
A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential: its ability to work together to change the community and change their lives.
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 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.'
It takes a good amount of time and money to establish a home. Eviction can erase all that.
Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market.
The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about.
The face of the eviction epidemic is moms and kids, especially poor moms from predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods.
When I was confronted with just the bare facts of poverty and inequality in America, it always disturbed and confused me.
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.
When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level.
