In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Resilience in the Face of Foreclosures: How National Actors Shape Local Responses todd swanstrom Since 2008 the United States has witnessed mortgage foreclosure rates not seen since the Great Depression. According to one estimate, between 10 and 13 million American homes will face foreclosure by 2014.1 Because foreclosures were endemic to the financial collapse of 2007–08, most of the national conversation has been about their macroeconomic effects and impacts on broader financial markets. But foreclosures also have local effects, leaving behind disrupted families, devastated communities, distressed municipalities, and damaged regions. My focus here is on efforts to deal with the local place effects of foreclosures; I say little about the impact of foreclosures on the national economy and deal with the effects on individuals and families only indirectly. I examine foreclosure responses through the lens of “resilience.” Resilience is essentially the ability of a subject to bounce back from a stress or challenge and return to pre-stress functioning.2 At this point, resilience is more than a metaphor but less than a theory. As a conceptual framework, however, it suggests a hypothesis worth testing. The central hypothesis explored here is the tension between efficiency and resilience.3 A region may maximize wealth accumulation by concentrating resources on one or more industries that give it a comparative advantage. But such specialization can make the region less resilient when consumer demand changes, competition from technical innovation arises, or globalization challenges the status quo. Other things being equal, 60 3 1. Hatzius and Marschoun (2009), p. 16; as reported in Weed and Garrison (2010). 2. See chapter 2 by Foster in this volume. Resilience is gaining increasing prominence in the social sciences. Between 1997 and 2007 the annual references to the term “resilience” in the Social Science Citation Index increased by more than 400 percent (Swanstrom 2008). 3. Swanstrom (2008). as reported in Hill and others in this volume, a regional economy with diverse industries will be more resilient than one that relies on only a few industries. Similarly, large-scale production with extensive specialization of labor may make an organization more efficient, but it also may make it less flexible and less able to alter organizational routines in response to an external challenge. Using these insights of resilience theory, I explore here the central question of whether national actors have enhanced or detracted from local resilience in the face of foreclosures. Before proceeding, an observation on the scale of resilient processes is in order. This volume is organized around regional resilience, the idea that effective responses require action at the scale of regions or metropolitan areas.4 With housing policy in the United States administered primarily at the county and municipal levels, systematic regional responses to foreclosures have been rare. In addition, most of the effects of foreclosures are highly local, negatively influencing surrounding property values, according to researchers, within about oneeighth of a mile. Regions have many housing submarkets, and with many privileged parts of metropolitan areas relatively untouched by foreclosures, there is little political will to attack the problem of foreclosures regionally. The majority of responses have been organized at the neighborhood and municipal levels. Although a good case can be made that coordinated regional responses would have been more effective, at this point resilience in the face of foreclosures has been mostly local and not regional in scale.5 Local resilience is constrained by what I call the “opportunity space,” the economic , legal, and institutional conditions that either expand or constrict opportunities for effective local responses (figure 3-1).6 The opportunity space within metropolitan areas is shaped by state and national actors. A good example is the length of the foreclosure process, which is largely determined by state law. States with nonjudicial foreclosure processes (not overseen by the courts) reduce the time from first foreclosure notice to sheriff’s sale, giving the borrower and foreclosure counselors less time to raise funds or modify the mortgage.7 Of course, local actors may have ample opportunity space, but they may not take advantage of it. In other writing I have focused on why some regions and local actors have How National Actors Shape Local Responses 61 4. See Pastor, Lester, and Scoggins (2009). 5. There are important exceptions to this generalization, such as the Regional Homeownership Preservation Initiative (RHOPI) in Chicago and regional collaborations such as the Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership. See Swanstrom, Chapple, and Immergluck (2009). 6. Swanstrom, Chapple, and Immergluck (2009, pp. 4–5). 7...

Share