“Wouldn’t You Walk Away?” Foreclosures and Homeowner Understandings (original) (raw)
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Journal of Urban Affairs, 2009
This article explores the contributions of neoliberal practice to the expansion of homeownership and the foreclosure crisis to illuminate the contradictions between the rhetorical goals of homeownership and the actual experiences of new homeowners. In doing so we explore the theories and practices that homeowners deploy to try to survive and keep their lives together. First, we review the aspects of housing policy in neoliberal regimes that led many of the homeowners we studied into both homeownership and foreclosure. In the second part, we analyze conversations from 14 focus groups in five cities with homeowners threatened with foreclosure to understand how neoliberal rhetoric and practices participated in their buying and potentially losing their homes and how they come to understand and act on their experiences of threat and failure. We conclude by redefining the foreclosure crisis and discussing the political moment of challenge to neoliberalism it created. With the foreclosure crisis deepening and little help for homeowners on the horizon, the financial sector received a $700 billion bailout in 2008. Although the bailout includes provisions for foreclosure mitigation efforts and assistance to homeowners, at the end of 2008 the Treasury had declined to use bailout funds to stave off foreclosures among distressed homeowners, with Treasury Secretary Paulson insisting upon a distinction between "investing" in troubled financial institutions versus "spending" on rescue efforts for homeowners (Andrews, November 19, 2008). This pattern of adherence to market discipline for "Main Street" and government intervention to save Wall Street could be taken from a play book written by critics of neoliberalism (cf. Harvey, 2005), though it remains an open question as to whether the magnitude of the crisis and the economic and political events of 2008 will signal a turn away from this script. In this paper, we explore the ways that neoliberal practice contributed to the expansion of homeownership and the ongoing foreclosure crisis to illuminate the contradictions between the rhetorical goals of homeownership, the actual experiences of new homeowners, and the ways they came to terms
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The real estate foreclosure crisis that began in 2006 was a global crisis involving multinational financial institutions that devastated families and communities across the globe. Yet, the United States was clearly the epicenter of this crisis. The foreclosure crisis was a principal factor in the reduction of the home ownership rate in the United States from 69 percent in 2006 to 63 percent in 2013. Major banking interests employed questionable and fraudulent lending practices that introduced new words, such as "subprime lending" and "predatory practices," into the public discourse. The American public, especially the American homeowner, realized that the worm that turned the apple brown was birthed by US banking interests. The resultant real estate "bubble" that burst exposed the inability of governmental regulations to keep abreast of changes in lending practices taking place in US banks and other financial institutions. More important, it also expose...
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In 2008, there will be at least 2.5 million new foreclosures in the United States. Record levels of mortgage delinquency, default, and foreclosure are causing widespread hardship in cities and suburbs across America, and causing repeated destabilization of global credit and investment markets. In this Forum, six housing specialists unravel the complex connections between urban geography, subprime lending, and foreclosure. Although a wide variety of viewpoints are represented, three common threads are evident. First, foreclosures are tightly linked to the lax underwriting standards and aggressive business practices of the subprime mortgage market. Second, the subprime-foreclosure linkage is a reflection of the steady deregulation of U.S. financial markets and the promotion of homeownership as the cornerstone of national housing policy. Third, deregulated mortgage market segmentation has created uneven new geographies of debt, risk, and default-superimposed atop existing landscapes of old-fashioned exclusionary discrimination. Low-income and racially marginalized neighborhoods, once redlined and excluded from mainstream credit markets, were at the center of the profitable wave of subprime abuse and equity extraction during the long housing boom, and are now at the center of the long, slowly unfolding catastrophe of the U.S. foreclosure crisis.
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Maryland Law Review, 2014
In a few short years, the American Dream has dried up like a raisin in the sun. Massive foreclosures of the mid-to-late 2000s have left the status of the American Dream of homeownership in serious question. In this paper, I argue that in order to formulate new federal housing and homeownership policy goals, the underlying vision of property rights that informs such policy needs to be examined and reoriented to one that recognizes the nature of property (specifically with regards to residences) as an interconnected and contextualized regime. In the decades following World War II, the federal government supported homeownership and egalitarian access to such ownership through legal regimes and rhetoric. The form this promotion took-the push for detached single-family houses-maps a model of property rights that values ownership, separation, autonomy, and a particular legitimate version of the "home." Despite this promotion, just before and during the Foreclosure Crisis of the mid-2000s, the federal government surprisingly abandoned this rhetoric and paradigm by moving towards a different model of property rights that treated the house as a commodity, evaluated like an investment and bound by the four corners of its mortgage contract. From this model, it could comfortably limit people's rights to their homes, especially for the 'irresponsible borrowers' amongst them. The use of both of these models has shifted the operation of property as a regime in the United States, and, as I argue, not for the better.
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This paper examines the prehistory of the foreclosure crisis in Cleveland, Ohio in order to understand the effectiveness of civil-society organizations in mitigating its impact on the city's neighborhoods. Social theorists and movement activists have often postulated civil society as an authentic and voluntaristic realm in which we constitute and act on shared values. The voluntary nature of civil society organizations also, it is argued, make them more responsive, adaptable, and effective in meeting the needs of the communities they operate in. The question is whether or not this has held true in the contemporary crisis. I find that in the 1970s Cleveland's community-based organizations were instrumental in securing resources from government and private philanthropies to deal with the urban crisis. The unintended result of this success was a general rationalization of Cleveland's civil society around narrow practices and market-based conceptions of value. In the process, civil society was transformed into a political technology that solved various dilemmas of rule, but at the same time it was transformed into a civic monoculture that made the city especially vulnerable to foreclosure. A key implication of this analysis is that civil society has been transformed into an object and stake of urban politics and, as a result, it should not be expected to protect society against neoliberal institutional transformations.
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Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 2006
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Drawing on qualitative interviews and fieldwork, this paper examines the risk factors that lead families into mortgage default and foreclosure risk. While neoliberal ideology and policy recognize lower-income families as at greater risk, in this paper we argue that immigrants and women experience particular risks – separation and divorce, the expense of remittances, poorer treatment in rental markets, and conflicting experience of ownership between the United States and country of origin. When these differences are ignored, social policies cannot respond adequately to the disproportionate risk that women and immigrants face to homeownership.
Gupta The American Dream, Deferred: Contextualizing Property after the Foreclosure Crisis 2013
In a few short years, the American Dream has dried up like a raisin in the sun. Massive foreclosures of the mid-to-late 2000s have left the status of the American Dream of homeownership in serious question. In this paper, I argue that in order to formulate new federal housing and homeownership policy goals, the underlying vision of property rights that informs such policy needs to be examined and reoriented to one that recognizes the nature of property (specifically with regards to residences) as an interconnected and contextualized regime. In the decades following World War II, the federal government supported homeownership and egalitarian access to such ownership through legal regimes and rhetoric. The form this promotion took-the push for detached single-family houses-maps a model of property rights that values ownership, separation, autonomy, and a particular legitimate version of the "home." Despite this promotion, just before and during the Foreclosure Crisis of the mid-2000s, the federal government surprisingly abandoned this rhetoric and paradigm by moving towards a different model of property rights that treated the house as a commodity, evaluated like an investment and bound by the four corners of its mortgage contract. From this model, it could comfortably limit people's rights to their homes, especially for the 'irresponsible borrowers' amongst them. The use of both of these models has shifted the operation of property as a regime in the United States, and, as I argue, not for the better.