AlyssaKatz.com

BookCourt notes

Thank you to everyone who turned out last night to BookCourt in Brooklyn, New York, to hear me read from Our Lot and offer some thoughts on how politics and ideology, along with a program of financial industry deregulation, made the real estate bubble possible.

I wrote up some notes for the talk, and they sum up two things prospective readers ought to know. One, why did I write Our Lot? And now that I did, what story does the book tell? Each has a two-part answer:

Why I wrote Our Lot
In the fall of 2005, I asked the Mortgage Bankers Association to send me their quarterly mortgage delinquency report. I was looking to see how Federal Housing Administration-insured loans were doing, in the wake of a fraud scandal. But much uglier numbers leaped out from the columns of data – foreclosure rates in Ohio triple the national average, and a subprime foreclosure rate of 13 percent. I wanted to know what was going on, and why. When I learned that the streets of Cleveland, Dayton and other cities were lined with vacant houses, I wanted to know how it had happened. This was the first time I’d ever heard of a mortgage-backed security. How could investors make money when house after house was going into foreclosure, often after being flipped again and again by real estate speculators at rigged prices? This didn’t make sense. The more questions I kept asking the more nonsensical the answers were, and I resolved to find out the truth.

Why else I wrote Our Lot
That spring a condo conversion of our apartment building pushed my husband and me out of the apartment where I’d lived for eight years, and we decided, rather impulsively, to buy an apartment elsewhere. We did it for one simple reason: continuing to rent meant that we could have to move again at our landlord’s whim as soon as a year’s lease expired. We bought not because we wanted to, but because there was no other way to have a stable housing situation. The upheavals of the real estate bubble became very personal to us. Almost no home or place was untouched by this tsunami of credit that crashed through the economy, and I thought it was urgent to share my story while telling so many others in the book. The real estate and credit bubbles have been a tumultous, transformative national experience and I hope in some small way that the book can chronicle what that felt like to live through, while explaining what exactly it was that infected the economy.

What the book is about
How did homeownership go from being the American dream to the American nightmare? How did we go in barely a generation from having home mortgages very difficult to come by to their being so ubiquitous, and generous, that homeowners could extract cash based on their property’s appraised value – and any home equity they were managing to build was just as quickly siphoned off by lenders?

What the book is also about
At its heart the real estate bubble is as much a political story as a business one. Entrepreneurs will do whatever they can within the law and sometime outside it to make money – that’s their job. It’s government’s duty to set the rules of the road. In Our Lot the most important actors are from government – they’re the regulators and presidents who pushed to make mortgages available to all as generously as possible, in a belief, one very genuinely held, that this would build a better world. This is the story of how that belief emerged and why the world it created was destined to fall apart.

Friday, June 26th, 2009 | Tags: BookCourt, homeownership, tenants
Posted in A Lot More | No Comments »