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
If we continue to tolerate this level of poverty in our cities, and go along with eviction as commonplace in poor neighborhoods, it's not for a lack of resources. It will be a lack of something else.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the moral responsibility society has to address poverty and eviction issues, suggesting that the failure to act is a matter of values rather than resources.
Matthew Desmond emphasizes that the persistent poverty and evictions in urban areas are not due to a shortage of resources but rather a deficiency in moral and ethical commitment to address these social issues. The quote serves as a call to action, urging society to recognize the human cost of inaction and to reconsider the values that guide our responses to poverty and inequality in our communities.
Themes
PovertyEvictionSocial JusticeResourcesMorality
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech addressing urban development, a leader could use this quote to underline the need for sustainable housing solutions.
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
Similar quotes
In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.
John PilgerRead
Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
Herman MelvilleRead
I want all of the work that I do to have a social justice footprint attached. I want it to move the needle forward when it comes to the perception of all people, but especially people of color.
Winston DukeRead
The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.
Gloria SteinemRead
We live in an interconnected world, in an interconnected time, and we need holistic solutions. We have a crisis of inequality, and we need climate solutions that solve that crisis.
Naomi KleinRead
As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.
Claudette ColvinRead