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
The high cost of housing is crushing poor families and sending them to a state of desperation.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The increasing expense of housing is putting severe pressure on low-income families, leading to dire circumstances.
In this quote, Matthew Desmond highlights the significant financial burden that rising housing costs impose on poor families. It emphasizes that as housing becomes increasingly unaffordable, many families find themselves in desperate situations, struggling to meet basic needs, which can lead to greater societal issues such as homelessness and instability.
Themes
HousingCostPoor FamiliesDesperationEconomics
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech addressing local government, one might quote Desmond to urge for affordable housing initiatives.
More from Matthew Desmond
All quotes βDo 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
Similar quotes
Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.
Muhammad YunusRead
To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.
Robert ReichRead
A universal basic income would be the best way to give everyone the opportunity to do more unpaid but incredibly important work, such as caring for children and the elderly.
Rutger BregmanRead
The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them ... It is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like.
John Stuart MillRead
Economic growth and environmental protection are not at odds. They're opposite sides of the same coin if you're looking at longer-term prosperity.
Henry PaulsonRead
Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.
Margaret ThatcherRead