Drag a $100 bill through a trailer camp and there's no telling what you will find.
… many social problems stem from poor housing.
Not only does the proportion of the poor increase with the growth of the city, but their condition becomes more wretched.
What's popular in places considered ghettos - whether that's the inner city or Appalachia - is having a decent quality of life.
The slum is the measure of civilization.
There shouldn't be two Indias; we need affordable housing. There are projections that by 2017, 18.78 million will be the number of those living in slums.
I was brought up in a tenement house in a working district. We didn't even have a bathroom! We had a gaslight in the hallway and a black-and-white TV.
I was born on a plantation, and things weren't so good. We didn't have any money. I never thought of the word 'poor' 'til I got to be a man, but when you live in a house that you can always peek out of and see what kind of day it is, you're not doing so well. And your rest room is not inside the house.
When we were bringing 'Raisin' onto Broadway, our first stop was at Arena in D.C. Several things struck me about being in D.C.: One was the enormous poverty around the capital at that time - it was 1973, '74 - and I was stunned by people literally living in poverty, with holes in their houses and other things.
I grew up in a low-income area of Tokyo. Like most homes in Tokyo, ours was small. It was a free-standing, two-family rental duplex built 30 years earlier.
I'm from the housing projects, where people can't afford $150 shoes.
Sometimes those apartments we lived in weren't finished, sometimes the rooms would be heated by the gas stove, sometimes we would heat our water on hot plates to take baths, and that was very sobering, especially as a child.
I live in Brick Towers, a public housing project in Newark's Central Ward. I moved in when the projects were privately owned by a man who the residents and I believed was a grade A slumlord.
There is a high cost for low living.
The side of town, the side of Louisiana that I grew up on, there's a lot of poverty.
I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.
I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this; if you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.
If I close my eyes, I can remember the first apartment where I lived with my family in Newark, N.J., in the late 1930s. The rooms were lined up like train cars - you had to go through one to get to another - and there wasn't any heat or hot water.
Five days in Nairobi slums changes you.
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.
All my life, I have lived in the chawls. They are my people.
You see, I was born in the slums, that was before the ghetto. The ghetto was kind of refined; the slums was right there on the ground.
We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.
To me, I'm the epitome of what a ghetto child is: I was raised by a single parent; I stayed in apartments my whole life; I don't think I've ever cut the grass.
Poverty destroys Americans every day by means of confrontations with the law, disease, pollution, violence and despair.
