If you have someone who is paying 88 percent of her income on rent, and we have laws that allow a landlord to evict a tenant who falls behind under those circumstances, eviction becomes an inevitability.
Matthew DesmondRead
A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential: its ability to work together to change the community and change their lives.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Communities focused on their struggles often overlook their strengths and potential for change.
Matthew Desmond's quote highlights how a community that is preoccupied with its disadvantages and hardships can become blind to its own potential for improvement and collective action. By focusing primarily on their struggles, they may fail to recognize the strength that lies in unity and the ability to collaborate to create meaningful change in their lives and environment.
Themes
CommunityPotentialCollaborationChangeHardship
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about social reform to encourage communities to focus on their strengths.
More from Matthew Desmond
All quotes →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.
Matthew DesmondRead
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.
Matthew DesmondRead
When I was confronted with just the bare facts of poverty and inequality in America, it always disturbed and confused me.
Matthew DesmondRead
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.
Matthew DesmondRead
Moms that get evicted are depressed and have higher rates of depressive symptoms two years later. That has to affect their interactions with their kids and their sense of happiness. You add all that together, and it's just really obvious to me that eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.
Matthew DesmondRead
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