Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.

I felt that writing about peoples' lives was a heck of a responsibility, and I wanted to know them in a deep way.

If you have someone who is paying 88 percent of her income on rent, and we have laws that allow a landlord to evict a tenant who falls behind under those circumstances, eviction becomes an inevitability.

Kids increase people's risk of eviction.

Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.

I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.

When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.

Trying to learn from communities and engage with policy makers and community organizers all across the country is really important to me.

Tenants don't have any right to court-appointed attorneys in civil court, so they're either facing their landlord - or his or her attorney - alone, or they just don't show up. That reflects a severe power imbalance.

The cost of evictions varies a lot, but it could be for landlords an expensive process as well. Among the costs for landlords as well is the emotional costs of an eviction.

I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn't only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, 'Shoot, eviction does that.'

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

If eviction has these massive consequences that we all pay for, a very smart use of public funds would be to invest in legal services for folks facing eviction.

If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling.

Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.

Why young men from the country become firefighters is hard to explain to people who are not from the country. For most of us, it's not about the rush, which fades with time, or the paycheck. We could earn more working for the railroad or a car dealership. I figure it's about the land.

Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.

Families who get evicted tend to live in worse housing than they did before, and they live in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and higher crime rates than they did before.

Moms that get evicted are depressed and have higher rates of depressive symptoms two years later. That has to affect their interactions with their kids and their sense of happiness. You add all that together, and it's just really obvious to me that eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.

When we think of entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare immediately come to mind. But by any fair standard, the holy trinity of United States social policy should also include the mortgage-interest deduction - an enormous benefit that has also become politically untouchable.

Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial.

When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up?

Families, when they get a housing voucher, they move a lot less. They move into better neighborhoods. Their kids go to the same school more consistently. Their kids have more food, and they get stronger. There are massive returns.

Since evictions go through court, it has a record that comes with it, and many landlords that I spend time with use that as a big screening mechanism. And that's really the reason, we think, families are pushed into worse housing and worse neighborhoods after their evictions.

Between 2009 and 2011, more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were displaced involuntarily, whether by formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation.

Eviction comes with a record. Just like a criminal record can hurt you in the jobs market, eviction can hurt you in the housing market. A lot of landlords turn folks away who have an eviction, and a lot of public housing authorities do the same.

There is a reason so many Americans choose to develop their net worth through homeownership: It is a proven wealth builder and savings compeller.

Home is where children find safety and security, where we find our identities, where citizenship starts. It usually starts with believing you're part of a community, and that is essential to having a stable home.

The face of America's eviction epidemic is a mom with kids.

Eviction reveals people's vulnerability and desperation as well as their ingenuity and guts.

I met a landlord who will pay you to move at the end of the week and let you use his van. That's a really nice kind of eviction. I met a landlord who will take your door off. There are 101 ways to move a family out.

You lose your home, you are much more likely to lose your job the year following. The reason for that comes back to the bandwidth problem: You're so focused on this event that you're making mistakes at work; you can relocate further from work, which can increase your tardiness and absenteeism and cause you to lose your job.

Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11% reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31% of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44.7%.

In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective.

I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty.

Many times when we are talking about displacement, we talk about it within the frame of gentrification, which focuses on transitioning neighborhoods. But man, every city I've looked at, Milwaukee included, most evictions are right there, smack dab in ungentrifying, poor, segregated communities.

Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street.

A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country.

If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the canard about this rich country being unable to afford more.

Eviction is much more an inevitability than a result of irresponsibility.

Evictions used to be rare in this country. They used to draw crowds. There are scenes in literature where you can come upon an eviction - like, in 'Invisible Man' there's the famous eviction scene in Harlem, and people are gathered around, and they move the family back in.

I started a student organization that was basically designed to connect students with homeless folks. We visited them and sometimes brought food, but mostly we were there for swapping stories.

This was what a lot of us, mainly young men, did in the summers in northern Arizona. This is how I put myself through college. I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school.

When I was confronted with just the bare facts of poverty and inequality in America, it always disturbed and confused me.

It takes a good amount of time and money to establish a home. Eviction can erase all that.

My dad was a preacher.

A lot of us who grew up in the country, hunting and fishing, being very familiar with the woods and dirt roads, have the skill set you need to fight fire.

When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level.

I'm from a small town, and I thought I would be a lawyer.

This country has so much wealth and so much poverty, and that seemed wrong to me. 'Evicted' was my Ph.D. dissertation.