Dispossessed: How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class by Noelle Stout (review)

More than a decade on from the Great Recession, it is evident that the economic crash continues to reverberate in the downward mobility of middle-class Americans. Noelle Stout's Dispossessed: How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class shows us why. She does so by examining erosion of middle-class livelihoods following the early 21st century collapse in home values and subsequent wave of mortgage foreclosures. Between 2006 and 2013, more than 13.7 million households entered foreclosure proceedings. Despite federal programs that allocated hundreds of billions to assist these homeowners, more than nine million households lost their homes to foreclosure. Stout follows the bureaucratic routines—fine print, convoluted applications, lost files, misdirected calls, outright lies—through which banks and financial institutions profited by denying more than seventy percent of applications for aid. As Stout writes, "My task is to make these bureaucratic dramas as vivid and memorable as the more visible scenes, the evictions and tent cities that dominated news coverage of the crisis" (7). This task strikes at the technical systems of political economy in order to theorize the moral economy of debt relations. In so doing, it offers a model for public anthropology that advances theoretical debates through deep engagement with issues of pressing concern.

Dispossessed is ethnographically grounded in Northern California's Sacramento Valley. Not only is the region home to one of the greatest concentrations of mortgage foreclosures, it is also where Stout has generations of family ties. This methodological standpoint allows Stout to observe a disjuncture between the contemporary dispossession of middle-class people and the federally-administered programs that allowed her relations to construct a middle-class existence following the Great Depression. By contrast to government-run New Deal projects, the response to the Great Recession was routed through the same lending bureaucracies that precipitated the financial crisis to begin with. As Dispossessed attends to this shift, it tracks how neoliberal economic policies have made the entrapment of middle-class people in unpayable debts a constitutive feature of twenty-first century capitalism. Using everyday moments of dispossession, Stout identifies how "post-middle-class-life projects" came to characterize much of contemporary American existence (14).

Dispossessed considers the conditions of predatory bureaucracy through five chapters. In turn, the chapters trace a chronological route though the making of the foreclosure crisis and its aftermath. Chapter 1 centers how the Sacramento Valley has been the recursive site of speculation and dispossession. As the valley became a heartland of middle-class homeownership during the second half of the twentieth century, it built upon settler-colonial territory that codified seizure as the foundation of American economic practice. Chapter 2 focuses on how subprime loan agents leveraged working class Black and Latinx social networks in the neighborhood of Oak Park to route people into mortgages they could not afford. Across the country, similar techniques saw foreclosures hit first and hardest in places like Oak Park, where they compounded the cumulative effects of racist housing markets. Chapter 3 moves through a series of middle-income neighborhoods across the valley. While people in places like Oak Park lost their homes before federal mortgage assistance programs existed, these programs promised a lifeline for homeowners with greater class and racial privilege. And yet, privileged homeowners also found themselves facing evictions after corporate lending bureaucracies denied their applications for mortgage modifications, citing incomplete information and lost paperwork. Chapter 4 turns to the employees of predatory bureaucracies who processed loan modification applications. While these employees were sympathetic to borrowers, their attempts to modify loans were undermined by circuitous applications and workflows demanded by Wall Street lenders. Stout contends these inefficiencies are not faults in bureaucratic rationalization, but purposeful designs that enabled lenders to expand the scope of profit and deny modifications. Chapter 5 returns to middle-class homeowners after banks denied their modification requests. Contrasts between government bailouts of financial institutions and their own impending dispossession drove middle-class...