From the author of
Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us
How the homes we live in turned into the monsters that ate our economy and the
United States became a nation obsessed with real estate.
Our Lot is the story of the rise and fall of the American Dream and the government project of social and financial engineering to make owning a home possible for those who had never been able to before.
From Washington to Wall Street and the heart of the subprime industry in Orange County, and from the streets and living rooms of neighborhoods across the country forever transformed by the bubble’s excesses, Our Lot reveals what went so disastrously wrong with a crusade that was supposed to create a more perfect nation.
Reviews
[A] trenchant chronicle of how “all that had been sacred about home lending” was upended, through a series of government policies that were enacted with seemingly noble intentions — broadening home ownership and priming the economic pump — but ended up turning homes into profit centers rather than places to live.
—Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times Book Review
Katz brings something fresh to the debate in “Our Lot” — a down-in-the-trenches history of how the housing binge bubbled up from decades of social engineering by a government bent on encouraging home ownership.
—James Pressley, Bloomberg News
Alyssa Katz’s “Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us” performs an invaluable journalistic service by giving us a bottom-up approach to the decade’s housing madness.
—Roger Gathman, Austin American-Statesman
There are many real estate stories yet to be told—while reading Our Lot, I kept wondering why I had not read these stories already, why there has not been more feature reporting on the people caught in the crisis…. Katz’s important book introduces us to people still reeling financially.
[A] richly detailed analysis of the recent (and ignominious) history of the American real estate market…Katz writes with authority and empathy. The many people the author interviews, from the single mother in Cleveland who lost her house just two years after buying it to the family living near Sacramento whose new home is already falling apart, become the heroes, victims and sometimes culprits in this gripping account of collective irresponsibility.”
—Publishers Weekly [starred review]
Advance Praise for Our Lot
With the real estate crisis blighting thousands of neighborhoods and millions of lives, Alyssa’s Katz’s lucid, coolly outraged new book is an absolutely essential guide to how it all happened. Katz had the prescience to see what was coming, and her deeply researched, historically grounded book can help us all avoid similar catastrophesvin the future.
– Michelle Goldberg, author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World
Brilliantly researched and tightly argued, Our Lot reveals the untold story of the housing crisis through the eyes of the victims and villains that created it.
–Christopher Hayes, the Nation
Our Lot is a page-turning tale of how a real estate boom was conjured on a foundation of false hopes and Wall Street alchemy. Alyssa Katz digs deeply into the devastation that reckless lending and cynical speculation visited upon American places like Cleveland, Ohio, and Lee County, Florida. Her book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the roots of our nation’s housing crisis.
–Michael Hudson, co-author, Merchants of Misery
Our Lot is a sobering account of the origins of our current mortgage crisis. Katz methodically, and with great precision, traces the roots of homeownership in American society. Leaving few stones unturned, Our Lot provides an incisive analysis of the rational and speculative decisions that have made America so susceptible to the twists and turns of the housing industry. The book is a timely historical account, but its lessons are clear and penetrating for the contemporary era.
–Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for a Day