Dispossessed by Noelle Stout

Dispossessed by Noelle Stout

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.

"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 *

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780520291775
ISBN 10	0520291778
Title	Dispossessed
Author	Noelle Stout
Series	California Series In Public Anthropology
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	University of California Press
Year published	2019-06-04
Number of pages	280
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.