Dispossessed: How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class

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.

Genres: Politics, Anthropology, Nonfiction

280 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 4, 2019

About the author

Dr. Noelle Stout is a cultural anthropologist, feminist scholar, and an award-winning author and lecturer. Formerly an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, Stout holds a research faculty position at Apple University and teaches at Stanford. She is the author of two books, Dispossessed: How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class and After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba. Stout earned a PhD from Harvard University, and a BAS and MA from Stanford University. She is a Northern California native and lives in the Bay Area with her family.

Reviews

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tells an important story about the ways in which, before and then after the mortgage crash of 2008, subprime mortgagors and banks not only lured people into mortgages (and homes) they couldn’t afford, but then used the government’s mortgage modification program to benefit themselves and, much of the time, do little or nothing to help homeowners in trouble (ending in foreclosures, abandonments, and sometimes squatting or destruction). Stout shows how people get into what they believed was a long-term reciprocal relationship with their lender, not expecting to be preyed upon either by the lender or by whoever the lender sold their mortgage to. Disillusion and rage were the result. The only problem with this book is that it is too repetitive and overdoes the language, sometimes too academic, sometimes too contentious.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Predatory bureaucracy is such a brilliant concept. We all know how aggravating it is to try to make large bureaucracies work the way one expects. It would be reductive to label this as a muckraking polemic, however. Dispossessed is more deeply about how when debt is commodified, the social ties implicit within it break down. This is the rare academic book that is readable and engaging for a broader audience as well. It is a very insightful and unique take on what happened in 2008.

[Alejandra (Allie) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing, amazing. I only did not give it 5 stars because there were parts where the evidence could have been tighter (e.g. like Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow), but if you want to learn about the 2008 housing crises and how it affected low-income and middle-class folks, this book is excellent. Should be posting more detailed review soon.