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Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That's not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that's what life needs to be - and that if it's not that, it's all screwed up. It's not.

Sometimes when you're relegated to your neighborhood, you forget that there's more important things than your neighborhood going on out in the world.

In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.

I grew up in Chillum Heights in the Washington, D.C. area., and it was never a garden spot. When guys go, 'Hey, when I grew up, my neighborhood was tough, and it was this and that'... the reality is that it was just a terribly sad place. And thank God, I was able to escape it.

Growing up in the ghetto is pretty hard. It's poverty; it's frustration.

There's a major underlying idea as you grow up that you need to just save your money and get that affordable housing at the edge of town where you're away from the city where all the crime happens or whatever.

After convincing myself that was maybe you should at least help out your neighborhood, I really started to think about it later on in life.

It's really kind of hard to be a suburb of nothing. If you don't have a downtown, you really don't have anything. It's hard to build a community around parking lots and subdivisions.

I'm sorry - I know America is supposed to be the land of the dreams and hopes, but it's like, when was that actually a real thing? I think from the very beginning it was all a lie, and it still kind of is. Stop trying to sell the picket fence, because there's another backyard here that you haven't looked at.

I think people need housing. And there's empty buildings, I think people should live in there. If you want to call them squatters, trespassers, hey, I call Wall Street thieves!