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. In years past, renters opposed landlords and saw themselves as a “class” with shared interests and a unified purpose. During the early twentieth century, tenants organized against evictions and unsanitary conditions. When landlords raised rents too often or too steeply, tenants went so far as to stage rent strikes. Strikers joined together to withhold rent and form picket lines, risking eviction, arrest, and beatings by hired thugs. They were not an especially radical bunch, these strikers. Most were ordinary mothers and fathers who believed landlords were entitled to modest rent increases and fair profits, but not “price gouging.” In New York City, the great rent wars of the Roaring Twenties forced a state legislature to impose rent controls that remain the country’s strongest to this day. Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience–this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision. . Matthew Desmond
I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. <span style="margin:15px;...
-
Neil Gaiman
Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth,...
-
Unknown
The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who...
-
Mother Teresa
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
-
Woody Allen
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
-
Mother Teresa
More Quotes By Matthew Desmond
Arleen thanked Pana. Getting off the phone, she thanked Jesus. She smiled. When she smiled she looked like a different person. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>The press had loosened its grip. From landlords, she had heard eighty-nine nos but one yes. Jori accepted his mother’s high five....
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. <span style="margin:15px;...
One's sovereignty over the land is expressed most powerfully in the act of banishment. Perhaps the first eviction recorded in human history was Adam and Eve's.
One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide...
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.
