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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
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Evicted Quotes Showing 1-30 of 295
“Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.” Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets. We say that at home, we can “be ourselves.” Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home, we remove our masks.

The home is the wellspring of personhood. It is where our identity takes root and blossoms, where as children, we imagine, play, and question, and as adolescents, we retreat and try. As we grow older, we hope to settle into a place to raise a family or pursue work. When we try to understand ourselves, we often begin by considering the kind of home in which we were raised.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
tags: home
“If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“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, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“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.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“But it was not enough simply to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them—which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“By and large, the poor do not want some small life. They don't want to game the system or eke out an existence; they want to thrive and contribute.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. 10 After the numbers were released, Milwaukee’s chief of police appeared on the local news and puzzled over the fact that many victims had never contacted the police for help. A nightly news reporter summed up the chief’s views: “He believes that if police were contacted more often, that victims would have the tools to prevent fatal situations from occurring in the future.” What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department’s own rules presented battered women with a devil’s bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“The rent eats first.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on our next generation.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“Often, evicted families also lose the opportunity to benefit from public housing because Housing Authorities count evictions and unpaid debt as strikes when reviewing applications. And so people who have the greatest need for housing assistance—the rent-burdened and evicted—are systematically denied it.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion.

Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 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 politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“The profits were staggering. In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landlord simply replied, “That’s why I bought the building.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They might buy lobster on food stamps.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle. Eviction was such a process.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“What else is a nation but a patchwork of cities and towns; cities and towns a patchwork of neighborhoods; and neighborhoods a patchwork of homes?”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a “significant precursor of suicide.” The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. “Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.” Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“Every year in this country, people are evicted from their homes not by the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands but by the millions.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“Whatever our way out of this mess, one thing is certain. This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering—by no American value is this situation justified. 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.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“You could only say ‘I’m sorry, I can’t’ so many times before you began to feel worthless, edging closer to a breaking point. So you protected yourself, in a reflexive way, by finding ways to say ‘No, I won’t.’ I cannot help you. So, I will find you unworthy of help.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate. 42 It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets. Boosting poor people’s incomes by increasing the minimum wage or public benefits, say, is absolutely crucial. But not all of those extra dollars will stay in the pockets of the poor. Wage hikes are tempered if rents rise along with them, just as food stamps are worth less if groceries in the inner city cost more—and they do, as much as 40 percent more, by one estimate. 43 Poverty is two-faced—a matter of income and expenses, input and output—and in a world of exploitation, it will not be effectively ameliorated if we ignore this plain fact.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“Landlords took the side streets, typically not in their Saab or Audi but in their “rent collector,” some oil-leaking, rusted-out van or truck that hauled around extension cords, ladders, maybe a loaded pistol, plumbing snakes, toolboxes, a can of Mace, nail guns, and other necessities.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“Sometimes, the truth comes out slow.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“It was not that low-income renters didn’t know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessities of life to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the effort….The evil day of reckoning is put off till a to-morrow that may never come. When it does come…it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the cradle by such incidents.”
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

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