Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
This country has so much wealth and so much poverty, and that seemed wrong to me. 'Evicted' was my Ph.D. dissertation.
When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.
Ours was not always a nation of homeowners; the New Deal fashioned it so, particularly through the G.I. Bill of Rights.
When I was confronted with just the bare facts of poverty and inequality in America, it always disturbed and confused me.
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.
I don't think we can fix poverty without fixing housing, and I don't think we can address housing without understanding landlords.
I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart.
Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.
Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities.
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.
Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.
The face of the eviction epidemic is moms and kids, especially poor moms from predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods.
Trying to learn from communities and engage with policy makers and community organizers all across the country is really important to 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.
There is a reason so many Americans choose to develop their net worth through homeownership: It is a proven wealth builder and savings compeller.
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.
Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today.
Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.
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.'
When I left Milwaukee, and I had all these stories. I felt so responsible for people. It's a heck of a thing to do, to try to write someone's story.
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.
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.
Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations.
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 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.
Public-sector union organisers have told me about how firefighters, police officers, and nurses can no longer afford to live in the cities they serve and protect.
I think there are ways that graduate students can fact-check their work. I think there are ways that we can do this that don't require massive amounts of resources.
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.
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.
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.
The cost of evictions varies a lot, but it could be for landlords an expensive process as well. Among the costs for landlords as well is the emotional costs of an eviction.
What we're seeing is that even in high poverty neighborhoods, the average cost of renting is quickly approaching the total income of welfare recipients and low wage workers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Families who get evicted tend to live in worse housing than they did before, and they live in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and higher crime rates than they did before.
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.
Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11% reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31% of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44.7%.
I saw people get fired after their eviction. But when I found that if you get evicted, your chances of losing your job increase by 20 percent, that's when it really hit home for me.
Between 2009 and 2011, more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were displaced involuntarily, whether by formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation.
Evictions cause job loss. Because it's such a destabilizing, stressful event, they lose their footing in the labor market. It has big impacts on people's health, especially mental health.
Child Protection Services can get all up in your business if you have kids. Just strictly from a business standpoint, kids are a liability to landlords, and they actually provoke evictions.
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.
I have always been really troubled by the amount of poverty in America. Americans are matched in their rich democracy with the depth and expanse of poverty. That's really always unsettled me.
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.
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.
When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up?
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.
In February 1932, the 'Times' published an account of community resistance to the eviction of three families in the Bronx, observing, 'Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000.'