Dispossessed

How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class

Noelle Stout (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

280 Seiten

2019
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-29178-2 (ISBN)

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In 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 programs—backed by over $300 billion of federal funds—to 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 homeowners—from 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.

Noelle Stout is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She is the author of After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba and director of the documentary Luchando.

List 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

Erscheinungsdatum	30.05.2019
Reihe/Serie	California Series in Public Anthropology ; 44
Zusatzinfo	22 b-w figures
Verlagsort	Berkerley
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Archäologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Makrosoziologie
ISBN-10	0-520-29178-6 / 0520291786
ISBN-13	978-0-520-29178-2 / 9780520291782
Zustand	Neuware