At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State

by Chloe N. Thurston

In the United States, homeownership is synonymous with economic security and middle-class status. It has played this role in American life for almost a century, and as a result, homeownership's centrality to Americans' economic lives has come to seem natural and inevitable. But this state of affairs did not develop spontaneously or inexorably. On the contrary, it was the product of federal government policies, established during the 1930s and developed over the course of the twentieth century. At the Boundaries of Homeownership traces how the government's role in this became submerged from public view and how several groups who were locked out of homeownership came to recognize and reveal the role of the government. Through organizing and activism, these boundary groups transformed laws and private practices governing determinations of credit-worthiness. This book describes the important policy consequences of their achievements and the implications for how we understand American statebuilding.

Genres: Americana, History

268 pages, Paperback

Published May 3, 2018

Reviews

[Roberta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an academic text of interest to scholars of housing, credit, social policy and American political development, but it can also be read as a civics text for the twenty-first century with the benefit of an objective vocabulary for use in political engagement in contentious times.

Chloe N. Thurston’s At the Boundaries of Homeownership describes the process by which, through public-private partnerships in the 20th century, homeownership was promoted and enabled for large segments of the U. S. population, while at the same time policy barriers to homeownership were set in place for groups seen for one reason or another as ineligible for access to mortgage lending.

It further details the efforts of three particular groups: women, people of color and people of low income. The members of these groups came to recognize their exclusion and set out to alter the terms of by which they were excluded so as to gain access to credit that would lead to homeownership, a process Thurston identifies as “boundary politics”.

The author's description of how that was accomplished details one path forward to enable changes in government policy as it affects access to government-conferred benefits. She shows how twentieth century boundary groups sought to expand their access to public benefits through what the author calls a politics of discovery. The process begins with the recognition of problems in accessing public benefits followed by sharing of experiences in accessing these benefits and by research into the effects of government policies on the different groups. It continues with the contesting of policies seen as excluding groups from benefits conferred on others on questionable grounds, and if the process is successful, it concludes with the expansion of access to benefits. Such a step-by-step description of a way to proceed is particularly relevant in a time of growing inequality and social division.

The quiet, dispassionate, and deliberate language used in the exposition of what the author refers to as an effort in concept-building belies the importance of its message. The policy state growing through public-private partnerships in the twentieth century expanded largely out of public view to affect Americans in more areas of life than they would have reason to realize, largely due to the complexity of the process and of the product rather than to any larger conscious intent to obfuscate. Despite the opacity of the role of government, parties to the process continue to affiliate to find ways to seek to improve access to publicly provided benefits - from access to credit, to homeownership, to health care, to criminal justice. As Thurston says, “Groups do things that individuals cannot.”