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 led to the largest bank seizures of residential homes in U.S. history. In the voices of policy makers, bank officials, and "dispossessed" homeowners themselves, Stout exposes the tense and lengthy confrontations between homeowners and banks, reveals how call center representatives of corporate lenders felt about processing appeals, and shares the daily fears of families living on the brink of eviction. Stout delineates the painful everyday life of inequality-for whites who felt the security of their middle class life unraveling to communities of color who experienced a more precipitous and dire decline. Trapped in an endless maze of mortgage modifications, borrowers began to view debt refusal as a moral response to lenders. Stout unveils how these borrowers redefined the meaning of debt and dispossession, altered our national discourse of financial reciprocity, and opened the doors to the many potential points of resistance and contestation in the meaning of indebtedness today.
