Deflating the Dream: Radical Risk and the Neoliberalization of Homeownership (original) (raw)
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Argumentation & Advocacy, 2018
This essay examines the relationship between homeowners strategically defaulting on their mortgages and a public shift in the American Dream of homeownership. It argues that the spike in strategic defaults from 2007 to 2011 constituted de facto performative enthymemes about (1) the legitimacy of defaulting on a mortgage and (2) the American Dream of homeownership’s declining cultural hegemony. National news reports identified the trend and filled in the enthymemes for a national audience. The enthymemes legitimized homeowners’ decisions to abandon their properties by treating homeownership as an investment, a move which utilized the neoliberal logic of capital against the interests of capital. This essay explains performative enthymemes, probes the cultural development of the American Dream of homeownership, and assesses the enthymemes produced by strategic defaults and outlined in national news reports.
The American Dream, Deferred: Contextualizing Property After the Foreclosure Crisis
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.
“Wouldn’t You Walk Away?” Foreclosures and Homeowner Understandings
Families in society-The journal of contemporary social services, 2018
Social work scholarship on neoliberalism-the dominant ideology and policies shaping access to housing, jobs, healthcare, and education-is in its infancy. This study examines the groundlevel impact of the subprime mortgage crisis that triggered the Great Recession in 2008, examining how homeowners interpreted the changes to their neighborhood as they witnessed a remarkably high rate of foreclosures during the economic collapse of 2008-2010. Residents of a suburban community were unaware of the lending and banking practices that transformed their neighborhoods, though these policies arguably depreciated house values and a sense of well-being. Not knowing the culpability of predatory lenders in the crisis, some residents turned to an anti-immigrant social movement to preserve their community.
Historically Illustrating the Shift to Neoliberalism in the U.S. Home Mortgage Market
This article takes a long view of the U.S. housing market; from its inception as locally owned and operated Building Societies, through one of the first major U.S. housing crises in the early 1930s, as well as through the prosperous and surprisingly stable post-WWII era the so-called "Long Boom" during Keynesianism. As labor shortages became more severe, accompanied by stagflation and the simultaneous urban, fiscal, and oil crises of the late 60s and early 70s, key sectors of the U.S. economy rallied to dismantle established Keynesian policies. While the new policies associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism certainly aided in the mobility of capital, the overall economy as a result of this neoliberal turn became increasingly unstable and inequitable. This article seeks to add knowledge to the neoliberalism theory. The author concludes, based on a historical case study of the Savings and Loans industry, that neoliberalism was not a deterministic overthrow of neoliberal ideologues but a haphazard response to the contradictions of Keynesian logic. It is only from a historical approach that we may be able to understand the current housing crisis, foster policy innovation, and allow for institutional change within the U.S. mortgage market sector.
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.
The Really Big Contradiction: Homeownership Discourses in Times of Financialization
Housing Studies, 2020
Belgium is a typical homeowner society where homeownership is not only the largest but also the 'normalized' form of tenure. The origins of the Belgian homeownership ideology go back to the early days of industrialization but the discourses surrounding the ideology are reproduced in the 21 st century. Our investigation of the largest region of Belgium, Flanders, reveals four main homeownership discourses: affordable homeownership, conservative housing finance, asset-based welfare and tenure neutrality. With a nod to Kemeny's 'The Really Big Trade-Off Between Homeownership and Welfare', we demonstrate that there is also a 'Really Big Contradiction' between the discourses that support homeownership as the 'normalized' form of tenure in Belgium and the reality of declining affordability, progressively less conservative housing finance, the fractions and inequalities of housing-based wealth, and the lack of tenure neutrality. In short, we argue that the financialized homeownership model is undermining the stability of homeowner realities and practices, but not so much the discourses and ideologies that support and reinforce the homeowner society.
Rhetorics of Risk in American Homeownership
2012
Rhetorics of Risk in American Homeownership, taking the post-2007 mortgage crisis and its problematic rhetorics of blame as a motivating exigence, investigates historical and contemporary economic discourses relevant to homeownership, with close attention to rhetorical constructions of risk. Building a theoretical lens that combines insights from rhetorical studies of risk, such as those undertaken by J. Blake Scott, with rhetorical critiques of political economy, such as that offered by James Arnt Aune, I illuminate risk logics as dynamic rhetorical resources that serve, in changing and adaptive ways, to shape notions of future certainty and uncertainty in accordance with the needs of a contemporary neoliberal political economy, where market mentalities infuse all aspects of social life. This lens, which draws on John Poulakos’ sophistic notion of to dynaton to locate the rhetorical force of risk in its ability to evoke and hierarchize multiple possible futures, aids me in discerni...
Cities Destroyed (Again) For Cash: Forum on the U.S. Foreclosure Crisis
Urban Geography, 2008
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.
International Journal of Housing Policy, 2013
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In the late twentieth century, homeownership became entrenched in a wider societal project associated with transformations in the economy and increased social inclusion. The ‘promise of homeownership’ asserted the potential of mortgaged owner-occupation in providing all with not just a stable home, but also the chance to accumulate assets and establish economic security. Underlying these ideologies was the implicit promise that homeownership can be widespread, equalizing and secure. Despite transformations in market conditions, especially since the Global Financial Crisis, such narratives have continued to drive policy approaches and support for marketised housing. Through an investigation of three ‘homeowner societies’ – the US, UK and Australia - the empirical evidence in this paper reveals declining access to homeownership, high levels of housing wealth concentration exacerbating social inequality, and intensifying housing price volatility undermining asset security. The paper contends that the socioeconomic potential of homeownership that has sustained the logic of housing policy for the last half decade may be increasingly recognized as a ‘false promise’ that has justified growing housing commodification, ongoing labour insecurity, and continued state retrenchment wherein housing markets increasingly function as a dimension of growing inequality and insecurity.