230 Quotes by Matthew Desmond

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?

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.

It is only after we begin to see a street as our street, a public park as our park, a school as our school, that we can become engaged citizens, dedicating our time and resources for worthwhile causes: joining the Neighborhood Watch, volunteering to beautify a playground, or running for school board.

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

Because giving increases your sense of self-worth and receiving diminishes it – ladling soup at the Salvation Army evokes a very different feeling from having it ladled into your bowl – there is good reason to expect people will overestimate the amount of support they give and underestimate the amount they receive.

They have shown that problems endemic to poverty – residential instability, severe deprivation, concentrated neighborhood disadvantage, health disparities, even joblessness – stem from the lack of affordable housing in our cities. I have made all survey data publicly available through the Harvard Dataverse Network.13 –.

For almost a century, there has been broad consensus in America that families should spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Until recently, most renting families met this goal. But times have changed – in Milwaukee and across America. 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.

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.

As much as $6 billion worth of power was pirated across America every year. Only cars and credit cards got stolen more.