Jemin Na’s Reviews > Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City > Status Update

"At the last station, the methadone dispensers sat behind a thick door on which someone had clipped an article from The Onion with the headline EVERYTHING TAKING TOO LONG, accompanied by a photograph of a man staring impatiently at a microwave."

"Just days after hearing this defeat, Scott ran into Heroin Susie and Billy at a gas station...That might have been an isolated incident...but then Oscar moved in with a full-blown habit."

It takes extra energy and cognitive effort to feel empathy and to realize that I am part of the problem. Doesn't personal responsibility get too much credit? I guess I can't stand when it gets weaponized to attack the vulnerable

"Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health: not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about your self."

"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."

"But the ghetto had always been more a product of social design than desire. It was never a by-product of the modern city, a sad accident of industrialization and urbanization, something no one benefited from nor intended."

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
"The Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation," Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2023): 167-207

Elder Johnson, Bishop Dixon, Sister Atalya---none of them knew Crystal was staying at the Lodge. Only Minister Barber knew. Crystal didn't want members of her church to reduce her, to see her as an object of pity, a member of "the poor and the orphaned." She wanted to be seen as Sister Crystal, part of the Body, the Beloved."

""When you look at Jesus, what do you see?" Larraine asked Betty.
"A hottie," Betty replied without missing a beat. A long, unlit cigarette shot out of her lips like a plank from a ship."

"To Sammy, Pastor Daryl, and others, Larraine was poor because she threw money away. But the reverse was more true. Larraine threw money away because she was poor.
... 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."

"They got on when there was food in their bellies and some certainty about the next day. But Arleen was in the press of the city, depleted. So when Crystal exploded, Arleen exploded right alongside her." Pg. 213

"Look how neighbors, perfectly peaceful when the crop yield is plenty, will claw and trample and bite one another when bread is tossed from a food truck during a famine." Pg. 376

"In NA, Scott had learned that addiction tightened its grip when you were hungry, angry, lonely, or tired - "HALT - and Scott was all four."

"When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice, full of "all sorts of shipwrecked humanity", they lost confidence in its political capacity."

"Who had time to protest inequality when you were trying to get the rotten spot in your floorboard patched before your daughter put her foot through it again?"