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 continue to tolerate this level of poverty in our cities, and go along with eviction as commonplace in poor neighborhoods,…

— 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 I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep…

— Matthew Desmond

Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial.

— Matthew Desmond

I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart.

— Matthew Desmond

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

— Matthew Desmond

I think there are ways that graduate students can fact-check their work. I think there are ways that we can do this…

— Matthew Desmond

Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.

— Matthew Desmond

“Sherrena nodded reassuringly and said, almost to herself, “I guess I got to stop feeling sorry for these people because nobody is…

— Matthew Desmond

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

— Matthew Desmond

A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential: its…

— Matthew Desmond

“It was once said that the poor are 'constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.' Especially for poor African-American families -…

— Matthew Desmond

A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country.

— Matthew Desmond

“Wildland firefighters do not enjoy the cultural prestige that structural firefighters do. They do not wax their fire engines and cruise down…

— Matthew Desmond

In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was…

— Matthew Desmond

You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.

— Matthew Desmond

Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what…

— Matthew Desmond

An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event.

— Matthew Desmond

“The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner…

— Matthew Desmond

Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.

— Matthew Desmond

“It was an old tradition: landlords barring children from their properties. In the competitive postwar housing market of the late 1940s, landlords…

— Matthew Desmond

“When people have a place to live, they become better parents, workers, and citizens. If”

— Matthew Desmond

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

— Matthew Desmond

“There are two ways to dehumanize; the first is to strip people of all virtue; the second is to cleanse them of…

— Matthew Desmond