Details

Subject(s)

• Predatory lending—California—Sacramento [Browse]
• Reverse discrimination in mortgage loans—California—Sacramento [Browse]
• Collection laws—Moral and ethical aspects—California—Sacramento [Browse]

Series

• California series in public anthropology ; 44. [More in this series]
• California series in public anthropology ; 44 [More in this series]

Summary note

"In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, more than 14 million U.S. homeowners lost their homes to foreclosure. Focusing on the hard-hit Sacramento Valley, Noelle Stout uncovers the hellish bureaucracy that organized the largest bank seizure of residential homes in U.S. history. Stout reveals the failure of 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, these corporate bureaucracies ultimately denied 70 percent of homeowner applicants. In the voices of bank employees and 'dispossessed' homeowners, Stout exposes the tense confrontations between borrowers and banks, reveals how call center representatives felt about denying appeals, and shares the fears of families living on the brink of eviction. Stout exposes the everyday life of rising inequality--for whites who felt their middle-class life unraveling to communities of color who experienced a more precipitous and dire decline. Trapped in a maze of mortgage assistance, borrowers began to view debt refusal as a moral response to lenders. Stout shows how these seemingly mundane bureaucratic dramas came to redefine the meaning of debt and dispossession, opening the door to current contests about the meaning of indebtedness"--Provided by publisher.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-255) and index.

Contents

• Introduction: Once sold, twice taken : a life undone
• Dream it, own it : genealogies of speculation and dispossession in the valley
• Put out : bank seizure at the poverty line
• Robbing Peter to pay Paul : relocating the middle class
• Can't work the system : the troubled sympathies of corporate bureaucrats
• We shall not be moved : the shifting moral economies of debt refusal.

Show 3 more Contents items

Other title(s)

How predatory bureaucracy foreclosed on the American middle class

ISBN

• 9780520291775 (hardcover ; : alkaline paper)
• 0520291778 (hardcover ; : alkaline paper)
• 9780520291782 (paperback ; : alkaline paper)
• 0520291786 (paperback ; : alkaline paper)

LCCN

2018055942

OCLC

1055263162

Other standard number

• 40029320149

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