Renting Quotes

“The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. 10 After the numbers were released, Milwaukee’s chief of police appeared on the local news and puzzled over the fact that many victims had never contacted the police for help. A nightly news reporter summed up the chief’s views: “He believes that if police were contacted more often, that victims would have the tools to prevent fatal situations from occurring in the future.” What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department’s own rules presented battered women with a devil’s bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“It was not that low-income renters didn’t know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“An idle mind is a devil’s workshop and I am prone to renting out my mind to the first bidder.”
― Anurag Shourie, Half A Shadow

“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, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“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. Arleen sacrificed for her boys, fed them as best she could, clothed them with what she had. But when they wanted more than she could give, she had ways, some subtle, others not, of telling them they didn’t deserve it.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“The Hinkstons expected more of their landlord for the money they were paying her. Rent was their biggest expense by far, and they wanted a decent and functional home in return. They wanted things to be fixed when they broke. But if Sherrena wasn’t going to repair her own property, neither were they. The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“If I am not the legal resident of the apartment you cannot evict me. You cannot evict Mrs. Tuttle, who is the legal resident of the apartment, because she is not living here. Unless you accept my check you are not going to receive any rent for the apartment at all because you cannot rent it to anyone else while I am living here because you cannot evict me so they could move in. Mrs. Tuttle will not pay the rent because she is not living here. Sincerely, Marian Griswold”
― Shirley Jackson, Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories

“For me, publishing books in hardback format is a protest against The World Economic Forum's decree that we will own nothing and be happy about it. In an economy that's subscription based, where we stream or rent everything as a service, this is my tiny, tangible fuck you.”
― Jarod Kintz, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, people wanted to rent homes due to social distancing and were avoiding renting in socially cramped apartment complexes.”
― Steven Magee

“Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“If you count all forms of involuntary displacement—formal and informal evictions, landlord foreclosures, building condemnations—you discover that between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetually behind; and many poor tenants would be perpetually behind because their rent was too high.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond by neglecting repairs. Or as Sherrena put it to tenants: “If I give you a break, you give me a break.” Tenants could trade their dignity and children’s health for a roof over their head. 13 Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem. 14 More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems—as were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did not.

Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted. But from a business point of view, this arrangement could be lucrative.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“The house in Bristol belonged to a family who were traveling the world on our combined rent.”
― Catrina Davies, Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed

“Indeed, we had caused some surprise by having a child not only while renting, but while renting in precarious circumstances, in furnished property, and without the proper contract and strict rent control enjoyed by most tenants.”
― Tim Parks, An Italian Education

“I've stopped preoccupying myself with the idea that my happiness is dependent on whatever might lie ahead in the future (in this case, buying a house). Contentment within my home is something I can find now - but only if I allow myself to actually appreciate the act of real living.

Contentment within your home is something you can find now, not in a far-off home-owning future.”
― Medina Grillo, Home Sweet Rented Home: Transform Your Home Without Losing Your Deposit

“People will always rent the affordable rental over the expensive one, even if it means driving a little further.”
― Steven Magee