Ethan

“We suggested she obtain a gun and kill him in self defense, but evidently she hasn’t. Therefore, we are evicting her.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“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, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Ladona had a housing voucher. Sherrena and Quentin didn’t accept rent assistance in most of their properties because they didn’t want to deal with the program’s picky inspectors.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“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.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City