Top 90 Matthew Desmond Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market. 24 Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation.”

— Matthew Desmond

52. “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.”

— Matthew Desmond

53. “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.”

— Matthew Desmond

54. “The profits were staggering. In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landlord simply replied, “That’s why I bought the building.”

— Matthew Desmond

55. “Lift the floor by rebalancing our social safety net; empower the poor by reining in exploitation; and invest in broad prosperity by turning away from segregation.”

— Matthew Desmond

56. “Families who spend more on housing spend less on their children.”

— Matthew Desmond

57. “But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans.”

— Matthew Desmond

58. “In the inner city, much was made of early milestones. Later ones might never come. –.”

— Matthew Desmond

59. “Instability is not inherent to poverty. Poor families move so much because they are forced to. Along.”

— Matthew Desmond

60. “Hispanic and African American neighborhoods had been targeted by the subprime lending industry: renters were lured into buying bad mortgages, and homeowners were encouraged to refinance under riskier terms. Then it all came crashing down. Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11 percent reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31 percent of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent.”

— Matthew Desmond

61. “People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. 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.”

— Matthew Desmond

62. “I learned that behavior that looks lazy or withdrawn to someone perched far above the poverty line can actually be a pacing technique. People like Crystal or Larraine cannot afford to give all their energy to today’s emergency only to have none left over for tomorrow’s.”

— Matthew Desmond

63. “Universal housing programs have been successfully implemented all over the developed world. In countries that have such programs, every single family with an income below a certain level who meets basic program requirements has a right to housing assistance.”

— Matthew Desmond

64. “Efforts to establish local cohesion and community investment are thwarted in neighborhoods with high turnover rates. In this way, eviction can unravel the fabric of a community, helping to ensure that neighbors remain strangers and that their collective capacity to combat crime and promote civic engagement remains untapped.19.”

— Matthew Desmond

65. “We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.”

— Matthew Desmond

66. “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.”

— Matthew Desmond

67. “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 –.”

— Matthew Desmond

68. “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.”

— Matthew Desmond

69. “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?”

— Matthew Desmond

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

— Matthew Desmond

71. “No state had a child poverty rate higher than Mississippi’s, at roughly 28 percent, which is also the child poverty rate of Costa Rica.”

— Matthew Desmond

72. “If tenants resisted excessive rent hikes or unwarranted evictions, it was because they invested in their homes and neighborhoods. They felt they belonged there. In the trailer park, that sentiment was almost dead. For most residents, Scott among them, the goal was to leave, not to plant roots and change things.”

— Matthew Desmond

73. “The Hinkstons expected more of their landlord for the money they were paying her. Rent was their biggest expense by far, and they wanted a decent and functional home in return. They wanted things to be fixed when they broke. But if Sherrena wasn’t going to repair her own property, neither were they. The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house.”

— Matthew Desmond

74. “Landlords took the side streets, typically not in their Saab or Audi but in their “rent collector,” some oil-leaking, rusted-out van or truck that hauled around extension cords, ladders, maybe a loaded pistol, plumbing snakes, toolboxes, a can of Mace, nail guns, and other necessities.”

— Matthew Desmond

75. “As Michael Harrington put it sixty years ago: “It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed, or doctored.”6.”

— Matthew Desmond

76. “By one estimate, simply collecting unpaid federal income taxes from the top 1 percent of households would bring in some $175 billion a year. We could just about fill the entire poverty gap in America if the richest among us simply paid all the taxes they owed.”

— Matthew Desmond

77. “As the sociologist Gerald Davis has put it: Our grandparents had careers. Our parents had jobs. We complete tasks.”

— Matthew Desmond

78. “Arleen’s children did not always have a home. They did not always have food. Arleen was not always able to offer them stability; stability cost too much. She was not always able to protect them from dangerous streets; those streets were her streets. Arleen sacrificed for her boys, fed them as best she could, clothed them with what she had. But when they wanted more than she could give, she had ways, some subtle, others not, of telling them they didn’t deserve it.”

— Matthew Desmond

79. “A higher minimum wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A stress reliever. Vocal segments of the American public, those with brain space to spare, seem to believe the poor should change their behavior to escape poverty. Get a better job. Stop having children. Make smarter financial decisions. In truth, it’s the other way around: Economic security leads to better choices.”

— Matthew Desmond

80. “People who were repulsed by their home, who felt they had no control over it, and yet had to give most of their income to it – they thought less of themselves.”

— Matthew Desmond

81. “Another found that achievement gaps between rich and poor children form and harden before kindergarten.”

— Matthew Desmond

82. “Our lives are tangibly impacted in countless ways – not only by things beyond our control but also by the relentless irrationality of the world.”

— Matthew Desmond

83. “When someone is shot dead, the children who live on that block perform much worse on cognitive tests in the days following the murder. The violence captures their minds.”

— Matthew Desmond

84. “Somehow, the United States has the unique distinction of lacking universal healthcare while still having the most expensive healthcare system in the world.”

— Matthew Desmond

85. “In the history of the nation, there has only been one other state-sponsored initiative more antifamily than mass incarceration, and that was slavery.”

— Matthew Desmond

86. “Poverty measures exclude everyone in prison and jail – not to mention those housed in psych wards, halfway houses, and homeless shelters – which means there are millions more poor Americans than official statistics let on.”

— Matthew Desmond

87. “It’s more complicated than that, some will say. Most social problems are complicated, of course, but a retreat into complexity is more often a reflection of our social standing than evidence of critical intelligence. Hungry people want bread.”

— Matthew Desmond

88. “The American poor are terrible at being welfare dependent. I wish they were better at it, just as I wish that we as a nation devoted the same amount of thoughtfulness, creativity, and tenacity to connecting poor families with programs that would alleviate their hunger and ease their hardships as multinational corporations devote to convincing us to buy their potato chips and car tires.”

— Matthew Desmond

89. “Which is all to say, a country as wealthy as ours could put our money where our mouth is when it comes to supporting life. But from the poor, we seem to just take and take.”

— Matthew Desmond

90. “When the poor take to the streets, it’s usually not under the banner of poverty. There is no flag for poor rights, after all.”

— Matthew Desmond

91. “As a source of the fledgling nation’s financial might, slavery shaped our political institutions and founding documents, our laws governing private property and financial regulation, our management techniques and accounting systems, and our economic systems and labor unions.”

— Matthew Desmond

92. “In poor communities, it is common knowledge that you must apply multiple times for disability, as if being denied over and over is part of the standard application process, and you’ll need to hire an attorney.”

— Matthew Desmond

93. “It was a freedom that understood what it was against but not what it was for, a malnourished and mean kind of freedom that kept you out of chains but did not provide bread or shelter or a means to get ahead.”

— Matthew Desmond

94. “It means that those who have benefitted from the nation’s excesses will have to take less so that others may share in the bounty.”

— Matthew Desmond

95. “Working on behalf of the common good is the engine of democracy, vital to our communities, cities, states – and, ultimately, the nation.”

— Matthew Desmond

96. “He isn’t bothered that his lawyer got paid. “He’s the reason I’m on disability,” Woo told me. But I can’t get over the fact that each year, over a billion dollars of Social Security funds are spent not on getting people disability but on getting people lawyers so that they can get disability.20.”

— Matthew Desmond

97. “It was not so much the rage of the poor white Southerner as the greed of the rich white planter that drove the lash. The violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. It was a rational part of the plantation’s design.”

— Matthew Desmond

98. “Giving the choice between parity with Black people – by inviting them into unified unions – and poverty, white workers chose poverty, spoiling the development of a multiracial mass labor movement in America.”

— Matthew Desmond