There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.

An eviction is an incredibly time consuming and stressful event.

Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market.

Even growing up the way I did, I was shocked by the level of poverty I saw as a college student. I thought the best way to understand it was to get close to it on the ground level.

You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.

The face of the eviction epidemic is moms and kids, especially poor moms from predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods.

Without the ability to plant roots and invest in your community or your school - because you're paying 60, 70, 80 percent of your income to rent - and eviction becomes something of an inevitability to you, it denies you certain freedoms.

I left college with a deep sense that I needed to understand poverty more.

I love Milwaukee, the rust belt. It's a very special part of America that's full of promise but also full of pain, where poverty is acute.

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

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

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

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.

My dad was a preacher.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.