Modifying the American Dream: An Ethnography of Foreclosure Prevention in the Great Recession
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Publiée
27-03-2023
Anna Jefferson
Charlotte Perez
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3751-9044
Résumé
The United States’ housing crisis and Great Recession of 2007-2009 ignited personal, political, and cultural reckoning with central facets of American identity, namely what it means to be middle class. Homeownership is historically a key symbol of having achieved the “American Dream” and entering an idealized middle class. As a cultural phenomenon, foreclosure is therefore a loaded symbol both of individual downward mobility and threats to a national myth of the American Dream. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Michigan in 2009-2011, this paper argues that the housing crisis created a liminal class status of “facing foreclosure”. From that vantage point, homeowners facing foreclosure and housing counselors assisting them critically re-examined the meanings of middle classness. The fieldwork reveals that they relied on material, moral, and political demands to obtain mortgage modifications to reassert their status as middle-class subjects. When these efforts failed, they turned to systemic critiques rather than the individualized blame the American Dream would predict.
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References
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Fields, D., Libman, K., & Saegert, S. (2010). Turning everywhere, getting nowhere: experiences of seeking help for mortgage delinquency and their implications for foreclosure prevention. Housing Policy Debate, 20(4), 647-686.
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Stout, N. (2015). #Indebted: Disciplining the Moral Valence of Mortgage Debt Online. Cultural Anthropology, 31(1), 82-106.
Stout, N. (2016). Petitioning a giant: Debt, reciprocity, and mortgage modification in the Sacramento Valley. American Ethnologist, 43(1), 158-171.
Sugrue, Th. J. (1996). The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). (2012). Federal Government and State Attorneys General Reach $25 Billion Agreement with Five Largest Mortgage Services to Address Mortgage Loan Servicing and Foreclosure Abuses. https://archives.hud.gov/news/2012/SettlementFeb92012.cfm. Last access: 10/10/2022.
Verdery, K. (1998). Transnationalism, Nationalism, Citizenship, and Property: Eastern Europe since 1989. American Ethnologist, 25(2), 291-306.
Visacovsky, S. E. (2017). When Time Freezes: Socio-Anthropological Research on Social Crises. Iberoamericana - Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 46(1), 6-16.
Weiss, H. (2014). Homeownership in Israel: The social costs of middle-class debt. Cultural Anthropology, 29(1), 128-149.
White, B. (2010). The Morality of Strategic Default. Los Angeles: UCLA Law Review Discourses.
Williams, B. (2004). Debt for Sale: A Social History of the Credit Trap. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Zhang, L. (2010). In search of paradise: Middle-class living in a Chinese metropolis. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Castro Baker, A., & Keene, D. E. (2016). “There’s a Difference—I Own This”: Negotiating Social and Financial Services under Threat of Mortgage Foreclosure. Social Work, 61(4), 321-330.
Chinoy, E. (1992 [1955]). Automobile Workers and the American Dream. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Coontz, S. (1992). The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap. New York: Basic Books, A Member Of The Perseus Book Group.
CoreLogic (2017). United States Residential Foreclosure Crisis: Ten Years Later. https://www.corelogic.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/research/foreclosure-report/national-foreclosure-report-10-year.pdf. Last access: 04/07/2022.
Cullen, J. (2003). The American dream: a short history of an idea that shaped a nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Drexler, E. (2008). Aceh, Indonesia: Securing the Insecure State. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Dudley, K. M. (1994). The end of the line: lost jobs, new lives in postindustrial America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dudley, K. M. (1999). (Dis)locating the middle class. Anthropology Newsletter, 40(4), 1-4.
Dudley, K. M. (2000). Debt and dispossession: farm loss in America’s heartland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Elyachar, J. (2002). Empowerment Money: The World Bank, Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Value of Culture in Egypt. Public Culture, 14(3), 493-513.
Fehérváry, K. (2012). The Postsocialist Middle Classes and the New “Family House”. In R. Heiman, C. Freeman & M. Leichty (Eds.), The Global Middle Classes (pp. 117-144). Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
Fields, D., Libman, K., & Saegert, S. (2010). Turning everywhere, getting nowhere: experiences of seeking help for mortgage delinquency and their implications for foreclosure prevention. Housing Policy Debate, 20(4), 647-686.
Formanack, A. (2018). This land is my land: Absence and ruination in the American dream of (mobile) homeownership. City & Society, 30(3), 293-317.
Formanack, A. (2020). Property without prosperity: Subjective valuation, financial citizenship, and negotiating moral personhood among manufactured homeowners. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 43(1), 54-68.
Gillin, J. (1955). National and Regional Cultural Values in the United States. Social Forces, 34(2), 107-113.
Goddard, V. (2006). “This is History”: Nation and Experience in Times of Crisis—Argentina 2001. History and Anthropology, 17(3), 267-286.
Heiman, R. (2015). Driving after class: Anxious Times in an American suburb. Oakland: University of California Press.
Heiman, R., Liechty, M., & Freeman, C. (2012). Charting an Anthropology of the Middle Classes. In R. Heiman, C. Freeman & M. Leichty (Eds.), The Global Middle Classes (pp. 3-29). Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
Hornsey, M. J., Bierwiaczonek, K., Sassenberg, K., & Douglas, K. M. (2022). Individual, intergroup and nation-level influences on belief in conspiracy theories. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2(2): 85-97.
Immergluck, D. (2009). Foreclosed: high-risk lending, deregulation, and the undermining of America’s mortgage market. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Jefferson, A. (2013a). Governing Uncertainty (Tesis doctoral inedita). East Lansing: Michigan State University.
Jefferson, A. (2013b). Narratives of Moral Order in Michigan’s Foreclosure Crisis. City & Society, 25(1): 92-112.
Jefferson, A. (2015). “Not what it used to be”: Schemas of class and contradiction in the Great Recession. Economic Anthropology, 2(2), 310-325.
McGinnis, T. A. (2009). Seeing Possible Futures: Khmer Youth and the Discourse of the American Dream. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 40(1), 62-81.
Montgomerie, J. (2009). The Pursuit of (Past) Happiness? Middle-class Indebtedness and American Financialisation. New Political Economy, 14(1), 1-24.
Newman, K. S. (2006). Falling from grace: downward mobility in the age of affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ortner, S. B. (2003). New Jersey dreaming: capital, culture, and the class of ’58. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ortner, S. B. (2006). Anthropology and social theory: culture, power, and the acting subject. Durham: Duke University Press.
Parker, D. S., & Walker, L. E. (2013). Latin America’s middle class: Unsettled debates and New Histories. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Pattillo, M. (2007). Black on the block: the politics of race and class in the city. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Perin, C. (1997). Everything in its place: social order and land use in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Porter, A. (2010). Fleeting Dreams and Flowing Goods: Citizenship and Consumption in Havana Cuba. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 31(1), 134-149.
Reid, C. (2010). Sought or Sold? Social Embeddedness and Consumer Decisions in the Mortgage Market. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. https://doi.org/https://www.frbsf.org/.
Rohe, W. M., Quercia R. G., & Van Zandt, S. (2007). The Social-Psychological Effects of Affordable Homeownership. In W. M. Rohe & H. L. Watson (Eds.), Chasing the American Dream: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Affordable Homeownership. Cornell University Press.
Ronald, R. (2008). Unravelling home ownership ideology. The Ideology of Home Ownership, 16-47.
Ross, L. M. (2009). The Internal Costs of Foreclosure: A Qualitative Study Exploring Issues of Trust, Insecurity, and Self in the Face of Foreclosure (Trabajo de Fin de Máster inédito). Washington D.C., George Washington University.
Sabaté Muriel, I. (2018). To repay or not to repay: Financial vulnerability among mortgage debtors in Spain. Etnografica, 22(1), 5-26.
Sabaté Muriel, I. (2020). “Good faith debtors” and the deservingness of debt relief during the Spanish home repossessions crisis. Etnografica, 24(1), 187-200.
Saegert, S., Fields, D., & Libman, K. (2009). Deflating the Dream: Radical Risk and the Neoliberalization of Homeownership. Journal of Urban Affairs, 31(3), 297-317.
Spindler, G. D., & Spindler, L. (1983). Anthropologists View American Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 12(1), 49-78.
Stout, N. (2015). #Indebted: Disciplining the Moral Valence of Mortgage Debt Online. Cultural Anthropology, 31(1), 82-106.
Stout, N. (2016). Petitioning a giant: Debt, reciprocity, and mortgage modification in the Sacramento Valley. American Ethnologist, 43(1), 158-171.
Sugrue, Th. J. (1996). The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Thomassen, B. (2009). The Uses and Meanings of Liminality. International Political Anthropology, 2(1), 5-27.
United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2012). The Recession of 2007-2009. BLS Spotlight on Statistics. https://www.corelogic.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/research/foreclosure-report/national-foreclosure-report-10-year.pdf. Last access: 04/07/2022.
United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). (2010). Report to Congress on the Root Causes of the Foreclosure Crisis. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). (2012). Federal Government and State Attorneys General Reach $25 Billion Agreement with Five Largest Mortgage Services to Address Mortgage Loan Servicing and Foreclosure Abuses. https://archives.hud.gov/news/2012/SettlementFeb92012.cfm. Last access: 10/10/2022.
Verdery, K. (1998). Transnationalism, Nationalism, Citizenship, and Property: Eastern Europe since 1989. American Ethnologist, 25(2), 291-306.
Visacovsky, S. E. (2017). When Time Freezes: Socio-Anthropological Research on Social Crises. Iberoamericana - Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 46(1), 6-16.
Weiss, H. (2014). Homeownership in Israel: The social costs of middle-class debt. Cultural Anthropology, 29(1), 128-149.
White, B. (2010). The Morality of Strategic Default. Los Angeles: UCLA Law Review Discourses.
Williams, B. (2004). Debt for Sale: A Social History of the Credit Trap. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Zhang, L. (2010). In search of paradise: Middle-class living in a Chinese metropolis. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
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