News and Reviews
NewsHour: Making Sense of the Foreclosure Crisis
Here’s last night’s NewsHour segment featuring Queens homeowners saddled with outrageous mortgages, with me explaining the history of government promotion of homeownership and (in the words of reporter Paul Solman) “good intentions run amok.”
On PBS NewsHour tonight
Looks like it’s confirmed: I’ll be on NewsHour tonight with economics reporter Paul Solman and Queens homeowners who got set up with atrocious mortgages by an unscrupulous developer.
You can ask me questions here, which I’ll be answering at NewsHour’s website. I’ll post video once it’s available.
Washington Post review
“Her reporting was prescient.” In The Washington Post Frances Perkins biographer Kristin Downey is the latest reviewer to pair Our Lot with Edmund Andrews’ Busted. She flatters me and finishes him off : “A thoughtful reader can’t avoid reflecting that it might have been better if Katz had been the economics reporter, hammering home the encroaching danger in article after article, and Andrews had been the one teaching journalism.”
She accuses Andrews of a belated, self-serving conversion from booster to critic of the financial establishment in the wake of his own woes as an overloaded homedebtor. I’m honestly not sure I’d be in a position to wield a hammer of warning had I been the Fed reporter for the Times. The failures of major media to anticipate the mortgage crisis were institutional more than individual. If anything Busted shows how capable a reporter and explainer Andrews is, once one gets beyond his brave but flawed delivery of his personal story of financial derangement. The biggest difference between our books is that while Andrews offers ample descriptions of how the mortgage business went over the edge in 2005-2007, his “why” is more or less limited to “Alan Greenspan.” I do the reverse: less forensic detail on lenders’ wacky underwriting standards, more investigation into the crisis’ deeper roots in politics, economics and culture.
Should Andrews have revealed his wife’s bankruptcies? Of course. The conceit of using his own story as an everyman proxy for the millions of troubled homeowners out there doesn’t quite work: by his own account, he’s an atypical subprime borrower, white, male and high income. But as a guide to the psychology of debt and delusion, Busted delivers.
September-October events
Upcoming author appearances:
New York City
Sunday, September 13, 2 p.m.
Brooklyn Book Festival, Cadman Plaza
Sunday, September 27, 3 p.m.
Queens Museum of Art
Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, talk with creator Damon Rich
Saturday, October 3, 10:45 a.m.
Dreamland Pavilion conference, Kingsborough Community College, Brooklyn
Atlanta
Wednesday, September 16, 7-9:30 p.m.
Emory University, Center for Ethics, 1531 Dickey Drive
Cleveland
Thursday, October 8, 4-6 p.m.
Building a Future Beyond Foreclosure forum series
Cleveland State University, Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, 1717 Euclid Avenue
Providence
Wednesday, October 28, 5:30 p.m.
Action Speaks, panel and radio taping on Levittown’s 60th anniversary
AS220, 115 Empire Street
Demos video
If you missed last month’s Demos forum featuring me and Beryl Satter and want to catch up, well, here it is.
Barnes & Noble Review
From the Barnes & Noble Review (belatedly). B&N calls Our Lot an
enlightening investigation of the housing bubble and ensuing bust…. Katz lucidly describes how these factors — a president looking to increase the homeownership rate, a mortgage industry on the hunt for new customers — helped set the stage for the subprime mortgage crisis.
Marketplace: holy homeownership
On NPR’s Marketplace, Tess Vigeland interviews me on the big question: Is homeownership good for you?
Daily Beast review
The Daily Beast weighs in, joining the “Katz lets borrowers off the hook” camp. I’ve got an equally loud chorus suggesting I’m too hard on them. My biased advice: read and decide for yourself.
Daily Finance review
…and from Zac Bissonnette at Daily Finance, extraordinarily generous praise.
A cavalcade of books purporting to explain the roots of the housing crisis have emerged over the past few months, but Alyssa Katz’s Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us stands out as the best one yet…. Buy it, read it, and send it to your Congressman.
Dallas Public Radio
Krys Boyd on KERA Dallas devoted a full hour to Our Lot last week — sharp questions, thoughtful callers, well worth a listen.
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.