Beyond the Great Recession: Was the Foreclosure Crisis Harmful to the Health of Individuals With Diabetes?

This article examines how the foreclosure crisis has been represented in a range of narrative genres: the reportage of Paul Reyes's Exiles in Eden: Life among the Ruins of Florida's Great Recession (2010), Michael Moore's documentary film Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), and Paul Auster's novel Sunset Park (2010).These narratives attempt to contextualize the human beings caught in the center of the subprime mortgage storm, but in the process each of them runs up against an opacity or obscurity, a crisis of representation. The article argues that underlying the financial crisis is an inability to recognize and comprehend deeply embedded structures of inequality, a failure common to both the financial system and the wider culture. Drawing on recent accounts of the techniques of credit scoring and mortgage securitization in the disciplines of business history, accounting, financial management, and human geography, the article concludes that subprime mortgage lending involved social relations of supremacy and subordination, as well as representational strategies which identified individuals solely in terms of credit risk, while failing to grasp the conditions of poverty and disadvantage which constituted them as a class.

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Metropolitan Chicago’s Geography of Inequality

10.5406/illinois/9780252040597.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Costas Spirou ◽

Larry Bennett

Keyword(s):

Great Recession ◽

Central City ◽

Physical Development ◽

Local Communities ◽

Neighborhood Structure ◽

The Great Recession ◽

Foreclosure Crisis ◽

Communities Of Color ◽

The City ◽

Municipal Development

The contemporary Chicago region is a space of striking racial and social class segregation. Even as the City of Chicago’s population has stabilized over recent decades, metropolitan Chicago has expanded geographically and in terms of population. At present, there is a striking pattern of exurban municipal development aimed at capturing prosperous residents and buttressing local tax bases. Nor has Chicago’s physical development occurred independent of broader trends in the economy and public policy. The City of Chicago’s neighborhood structure has been profoundly affected by the demolition and mixed-income redevelopment of former public housing neighborhoods, central city gentrification, and following the Great Recession of 2008, the foreclosure crisis that particularly struck local communities of color. Contemporary Chicago’s geography of inequality is thus a palimpsest of recently generated neoliberal processes overlaying an older geography forged by industrial era urbanization and suburbanization.

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Racialized Recovery: Postforeclosure Pathways in Boston Neighborhoods

City and Community ◽

10.1111/cico.12472 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 18 (4) ◽

pp. 1287-1313 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Jackelyn Hwang

Keyword(s):

Great Recession ◽

Race And Ethnicity ◽

Well Being ◽

Housing Crisis ◽

Predominantly Black ◽

Black Neighborhoods ◽

The Great Recession ◽

Foreclosure Crisis ◽

Corporate Investors ◽

The Stability

Following the Great Recession, homeownership rates declined precipitously, raising concerns for the stability and well–being of neighborhoods. While many studies document shifts in household constraints, this article draws from foreclosure records from 2006 to 2011, subsequent transactions, tax exemption filings, and maintenance data in Boston, Massachusetts to show how the foreclosure crisis altered the landscape of ownership and unfolded differentially across hard–hit neighborhoods. Results from logistic regression analyses show that corporate investors were more likely to purchase foreclosures in predominantly black hard–hit neighborhoods, while owner–occupants were more likely to purchase foreclosures in hard–hit mixed–ethnoracial neighborhoods with substantial shares of non–Hispanic/Latinx whites. Relative to other foreclosure buyers, corporations were more likely to resell previously foreclosed properties to other investors and have reported maintenance issues against them. The findings have implications for further disadvantages for hard–hit black neighborhoods and highlight how the housing crisis exacerbated neighborhood inequality by race and ethnicity.

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