American - Sociologist | -
I left college with a deep sense that I needed to understand poverty more.
Matthew Desmond
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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.
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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.
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The face of the eviction epidemic is moms and kids, especially poor moms from predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods.
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You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.
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The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about.
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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.
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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.
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An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event.
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There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.
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I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.
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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.'
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