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Quote by Matthew Desmond

“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.”

Quote by Matthew Desmond

Book:Poverty, by America
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Poverty, by America

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Matthew Desmond

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“It wasn't just this street that she was afraid of or that was bad. It was any street where people were packed together like sardines in a can. And it wasn't just this city. It was any city where they set up a line and say black folks stay on this side and white folks on this side, so that the black folks were crammed on top of each other—jammed and packed and forced into the smallest possible space until they were completely cut off from light and air. It was any place where the women had to work to support the families because the men couldn't get jobs and the men got bored and pulled out and the kids were left without proper homes because there was nobody around to put a heart into it. Yes. It was any place where people were so damn poor they didn't have time to do anything but work, and their bodies were the only source of relief from the pressure under which they lived; and where the crowding together made the young girls wise beyond their years. It all added up to the same thing, she decided—white people. She hated them. She would always hate them.”

CitiesPovertyRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationRace RelationsWhitesNeighborhoodsOvercrowding
Book:The Street
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“There are more people now, more children, going without health care ... A medical team surveying twenty-five hundred poor children in the District found that eight out of ten had untreated medical or dental problems. The infant mortality rate in the District, already the highest in the nation and higher than that of many Third World nations, actually rose ... and prenatal care was considered an important causative factor. ~Lenore Horowitz, quoted by Jimmy Carter”

PovertyHealth Care AccessRight To Health Care
Book:Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life
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“A confession. At the beginning of my career, I would inwardly roll my eyes at children who had no schoolbooks but the latest mobile phones or sneakers... I had misunderstood many things ... a poor but stable family is very different from a poor and unstable one...mobile phones and hoodies sometimes carry far more meaning than their superficial appearance...Parents who have very little can carry enormous burdens of guilt born of love; their hearts ache with the knowledge of the happiness that is missing in a childhood that is, after all, painfully fleeting. Such parents often remember the privations and suffering of their own youth and don't want them to be repeated.”

EducationPoverty
Author:Brendan James Murray
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“It's not that Teta doesn't think about money—that's a privilege our family will never know—but to discuss her anxieties with me would be 'ayb. It would be a mark of shame; she'd feel like she'd failed me. The children and grandchildren of "real Americans," the ones who made it, shouldn't need to fear poverty. But Teta has found walls in this country that she never could have imagined.”

PovertyImmigrationParents
Book:The Thirty Names of Night
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