News and Reviews
Shelterforce review
At Shelterforce, an excellent magazine about community development, John Atlas reviews Our Lot.
With her keen eye, vivid descriptions, and a sense of irony, Katz helps us navigate this complex story by traveling across the country so we can meet the winners, and (mostly) the losers….Katz’s compelling narrative implicates the entire financial and housing food chain, which participated in this greedy shell game. Brokers who brought the borrowers to the lenders, mortgage companies that provided the mortgages, Wall Street firms who packaged the subprime loans into exotic investments, investors who bought the securities seeking the highest rates possible and credit agencies that cheated on the ratings. Greenspan and the regulators kept pumping money in, and instead of providing oversight, they just looked the other way. Some acted legally. Some acted illegally. But most of it was simply business as usual.
Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, in discussing the roots of our homeownership obsession, proves to be a remarkably thorough and perceptive analysis of the recent housing bubble, how the bubble contributed to the current recession, and what we should do to avoid another bubble And it’s a great read.
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.