230 Quotes by Matthew Desmond

I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.

I'm from a small town, and I thought I would be a lawyer.

I want my work to influence public conversation, to turn heads, and to bear witness to this problem that's raging in our cities. If journalism helps me with that, I'll draw on journalism... and I'm not going to worry too much if academics get troubled over that distinction.

This country has so much wealth and so much poverty, and that seemed wrong to me. 'Evicted' was my Ph.D. dissertation.

Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.

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.

I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school.

I left college with a deep sense that I needed to understand poverty more.

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.