By Alyssa Katz
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2009); 978-1596914797
This richly detailed analysis of the recent (and
ignominious) history of the American real estate market opens on a note of
false optimism: in 1991, after 20 years of toil, urban housing activist Gale
Cincotta successfully argued that Congress should require that 40% of the home
loans issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac go to low-income buyers. The Clinton
administration extended this campaign for higher ownership rates among
low-income populations throughout the 1990s. Katz, a journalism professor at New
York University, draws on an impressive number of interviews and thorough
secondary research to illuminate the disastrous consequences of pushing
underqualified buyers into ownership. Many of the topics she addresses will be
familiar to readers by now—predatory subprime loans, get-rich-quick house
flipping schemes, scandalous mortgage frauds—but 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. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed
Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.