In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, more than 14 million U.S.
homeowners filed for foreclosure. Focusing on the hard-hit Sacramento
Valley, Noelle Stout uncovers the predacious bureaucracy that organized
the largest bank seizure of residential homes in U.S. history. Stout
reveals the failure of Wall Street banks' mortgage assistance
programs--backed by over $300 billion of federal funds--to deliver on
the promise of relief. Unlike the programs of the Great Depression, in
which the government took on the toxic mortgage debt of Americans,
corporate lenders and loan servicers ultimately denied over 70 percent
of homeowner applications. In the voices of bank employees and
homeowners, Stout unveils how call center representatives felt about
denying appeals and shares the fears of families living on the brink of
eviction. Stout discloses the impacts of rising inequality on
homeowners--from whites who felt their middle-class life unraveling to
communities of color who experienced a more precipitous and dire
decline. Trapped in a Kafkaesque maze of mortgage assistance, borrowers
began to view debt refusal as a moral response to lenders, as seemingly
mundane bureaucratic dramas came to redefine the meaning of debt and
dispossession.