Description
Book SynopsisIn the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, more than 14 million U.S. homeowners filed for foreclosure. Focusing on the hard-hit Sacramento Valley, Noelle Stout uncovers the predacious bureaucracy that organized the largest bank seizure of residential homes in U.S. history. Stout reveals the failure of Wall Street banks' mortgage assistance programsbacked by over $300 billion of federal fundsto deliver on the promise of relief. Unlike the programs of the Great Depression, in which the government took on the toxic mortgage debt of Americans, corporate lenders and loan servicers ultimately denied over 70 percent of homeowner applications. In the voices of bank employees and homeowners, Stout unveils how call center representatives felt about denying appeals and shares the fears of families living on the brink of eviction. Stout discloses the impacts of rising inequality on homeownersfrom whites who felt their middle-class life unraveling to communities of color who experienced a more precipitous and dire decline. Trapped in a Kafkaesque maze of mortgage assistance, borrowers began to view debt refusal as a moral response to lenders, as seemingly mundane bureaucratic dramas came to redefine the meaning of debt and dispossession.
Trade Review"Building on existing research about the Great Recession, [Stout] offers intimate interviews with a dozen families who lost their homes in the Sacramento Valley. . . . Highly recommended." * CHOICE *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Introduction. Once Sold, Twice Taken: A Life Undone
1. Dream It, Own It: Genealogies of Speculation
and Dispossession in the Valley
Landscapes 2. Put Out: Bank Seizure at the Poverty Line
3. Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Relocating the Middle Class
Documents 4. Can’t Work the System: The Troubled Sympathies of Corporate
Bureaucrats
5. We Shall Not Be Moved: The Shifting Moral
Economies of Debt Refusal
Drawings Conclusion. You Can’t Go Home Again
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
References
Index
