Top 90 Matthew Desmond Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.”

— Matthew Desmond

2. “Along with instability, eviction also causes loss. Families lose not only their home, school, and neighborhood but also their possessions: furniture, clothes, books. It takes a good amount of money and time to establish a home. Eviction can erase all that.”

— Matthew Desmond

3. “You could only say ‘I’m sorry, I can’t’ so many times before you began to feel worthless, edging closer to a breaking point. So you protected yourself, in a reflexive way, by finding ways to say ‘No, I won’t.’ I cannot help you. So, I will find you unworthy of help.”

— Matthew Desmond

4. “Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.”

— Matthew Desmond

5. “Whatever our way out of this mess, one thing is certain. This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering – by no American value is this situation justified. No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.”

— Matthew Desmond

6. “Sometimes, the truth comes out slow.”

— Matthew Desmond

7. “If we acknowledge that housing is a basic right of all Americans, then we must think differently about another right: the right to make as much money as possible by providing families with housing. And especially to profit excessively from the less fortunate.”

— Matthew Desmond

8. “It was once said that the poor are ‘constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.’ Especially for poor African-American families – who live in neighborhoods with rates of violence and concentrated poverty so extreme that even the worst white neighborhoods bear little resemblance – living in degrading housing in dangerous neighborhoods sent a clear message about where the wider society thought they belonged.”

— Matthew Desmond

9. “Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.” Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.”

— Matthew Desmond

10. “Eviction’s fallout is severe. Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street. It invites depression and illness, compels families to move into degrading housing in dangerous neighborhoods, uproots communities, and harms children. Eviction reveals people’s vulnerabilities and desperation, as well as their ingenuity and guts.”

— Matthew Desmond

11. “Trailer park residents rarely raised a fuss about a neighbor’s eviction, whether that person was a known drug addict or not. Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They “helped get rid of the riffraff,” some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.”

— Matthew Desmond

12. “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.”

— Matthew Desmond

13. “America is supposed to be a place where you can better yourself, your family, and your community. But this is only possible if you have a stable home.”

— Matthew Desmond

14. “The pursuit of happiness undeniably includes the pursuit of material well-being: minimally, being able to secure basic necessities. It can be overwhelming to consider how much happiness has been lost, how many capabilities snuffed out, by the swell of poverty in this land and our collective decision not to provide all our citizens with a stable and decent place to live.”

— Matthew Desmond

15. “The rent eats first.”

— Matthew Desmond

16. “But it was not enough simply to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them – which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.”

— Matthew Desmond

17. “Choosing to have a child outside of marriage may be an individual choice, but condemning many of those parents and their children to a life of poverty is a societal one.”

— Matthew Desmond

18. “Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you; that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed, roughed up and handcuffed.”

— Matthew Desmond

19. “The American government gives the most help to those who need it least. This is the true nature of our welfare state, and it has far-reaching implications, not only for our bank accounts and poverty levels, but also for our psychology and civic spirit.”

— Matthew Desmond

20. “When we refuse to recognize what works, we risk swallowing the lie that nothing does. We risk imagining the future only as more of the same. We risk giving in to despair, perhaps the most exculpating of all emotions, and submitting to cynicism, perhaps the most conservative of all belief systems. This can suffocate meaningful action, and it certainly doesn’t inspire others to join the cause.”

— Matthew Desmond

21. “Poverty might consume your life, but it’s rarely embraced as an identity. It’s more socially acceptable today to disclose a mental illness than to tell someone you’re broke.”

— Matthew Desmond

22. “This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy.”

— Matthew Desmond

23. “A racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny Black freedom but built white fortunes.”

— Matthew Desmond

24. “Opportunity can be hoarded, then, not only by abandoning public goods for private ones, but also by leveraging individual fortunes to acquire access to exclusive public goods, buying yourself into an upscale community. In many corners of America, a pricey mortgage doesn’t just buy a home; it also buys a good education, a well-run soccer league, and public safety so thick and expected it appears natural, instead of the product of social design.”

— Matthew Desmond

25. “Second, we prioritize the subsidization of affluence over the alleviation of poverty.”

— Matthew Desmond

26. “I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back. -Tolstoy.”

— Matthew Desmond

27. “Lousy, underpaid work is not an indispensable, if regrettable, by-product of capitalism, as some pro-business defenders claim today.”

— Matthew Desmond

28. “Since 1985, rent prices have exceeded income gains by 325 percent.”

— Matthew Desmond

29. “Where would the money come from? The best place to start, in my view, is with the cheaters. The IRS now estimates that the United States loses more than $1 trillion a year in unpaid taxes, most of it owing to tax avoidance by multinational corporations and wealthy families. Congress hasn’t given the agency the resources it needs to hunt down tax criminals, leaving the IRS outgunned and outmatched.”

— Matthew Desmond

30. “For entry-level workers, noncompete clauses are not used to protect a company’s intellectual property but to intimidate poorly paid employees and diminish one of the few powers they have left: the power to quit.”

— Matthew Desmond

31. “To live and strive in modern America is to participate in a series of morally fraught systems. If a family’s entire financial livelihood depends on the value of its home, it’s not hard to understand why that family would oppose anything that could potentially lower its property values, like a proposal to develop an affordable housing complex in the neighborhood.”

— Matthew Desmond

32. “If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent – at least when it comes to housing – we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.”

— Matthew Desmond

33. “Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on our next generation.”

— Matthew Desmond

34. “90 percent of landlords are represented by attorneys, and 90 percent of tenants are not.35 Low-income families on the edge of eviction have no right to counsel. But when tenants have lawyers, their chances of keeping their homes increase dramatically.36 Establishing publicly funded legal services for low-income families in housing court would be a cost-effective measure that would prevent homelessness, decrease evictions, and give poor families a fair shake. In.”

— Matthew Desmond

35. “We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.”

— Matthew Desmond

36. “No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.”

— Matthew Desmond

37. “When people have a place to live, they become better parents, workers, and citizens. If.”

— Matthew Desmond

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

— Matthew Desmond

39. “No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.”

— Matthew Desmond

40. “Families have watched their incomes stagnate, or even fall, while their housing costs have soared. Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on. Millions of Americans are evicted every year because they can’t make rent.”

— Matthew Desmond

41. “By and large, the poor do not want some small life. They don’t want to game the system or eke out an existence; they want to thrive and contribute.”

— Matthew Desmond

42. “It was not that low-income renters didn’t know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them.”

— Matthew Desmond

43. “Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle. Eviction was such a process.”

— Matthew Desmond

44. “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.”

— Matthew Desmond

45. “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

— Matthew Desmond

46. “It was once said that the poor are “constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.”

— Matthew Desmond

47. “Often, evicted families also lose the opportunity to benefit from public housing because Housing Authorities count evictions and unpaid debt as strikes when reviewing applications. And so people who have the greatest need for housing assistance – the rent-burdened and evicted – are systematically denied it.”

— Matthew Desmond

48. “The time and emotional energy they spent making rent, delaying eviction, or finding another place to live when homeless could instead be spent on things that enriched their lives: community college classes, exercise, finding a good job, maybe a good man too. But our current state of affairs “reduces to poverty people born for better things.”

— Matthew Desmond

49. “Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.8.”

— Matthew Desmond

50. “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.”

— Matthew Desmond