For sale: The American dream | Fault Lines
1,204,485
Published 2012-09-04
After a landmark settlement, the major banks have lifted a freeze on foreclosures and government relief has been too small to make a difference.
"We are often portrayed as the bad people, like we basically just come in and make all the money from people who are in bad situations. But the fact is, if we don't buy the property then the bank [will] take the property back."
- Amy Chen, a real estate investor
Public housing budgets have been slashed, leaving larger numbers of people with no place to call home.
The line between home ownership and homelessness is growing ever more blurry, but neither President Barack Obama nor Governor Mitt Romney have made housing a major campaign issue.
Meanwhile, popular anger is rising over the perceived impunity of the banks and some have found innovative ways of fighting back in an age of austerity.
Fault Lines travels to Chicago and California to see how people at the frontlines of the crisis are confronting the collapse of the American dream.
"If you ask people who have been foreclosed upon, whose fault is it? They often they say it's mine. It's my fault, I did the wrong thing, instead of kind of saying this is a systemic problem," explains David Harvey, a social theorist and a professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
"Capital is always producing surpluses, at the end of the day if you have got a profit, you've got a surplus and the big question is what do you do with it.
"[So] what you do is that you take part of that surplus and you reinvest it in something. And in United States, housing and urbanisation in general has been a vast field for expansion of profitable opportunities."
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All Comments (21)
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That deputy looks worn down. I don't care how much you try to block it, seeing people especially children being evicted must be heartbreaking. I couldn't do it.
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When I first bought my house in 1994 I Was approved for $300K but my wife and I knew we could not afford that big of a mortgage. So we decided to go for the base model house which we knew we could afford. Then 8 years later I noticed that the value of my house had somehow tripled. I had taken a real estate course and knew that something was not right. We decided to sell before the Real Estate balloon bursts. We sold our home in August of 2006 and thank God we did.
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4:30 "Everyone needs to take responsibility, I pay my mortgage where I live so everybody else has too" ...what this "vulture" investor lady doesn't realize is that an accident, a major illness, loss of job, divorce, a death in the family can wipe out a family's savings and leave them unable to pay the mortgage and bills. For most it's not lack of responsibility but unfortunate events, I hope vulture lady doesn't find out the hard way.
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“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks…will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” – Thomas Jefferson in the debate over the Re-charter of the Bank Bill (1809)
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I live in suburban LA. Oct. 3, 2014, I was laid off from the clinic. I went home that night, woke up next day and went out the front yard where a man was there. "Your rental property has been foreclosed upon, you have a month to vacate." After nearly 6 months on unen-joyment, I finally have my first interview Tuesday. Wish me luck!
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the banks are like the casinos . . . . they never lose
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Banks will never be your friend. They don't care about you only themselves.
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oh god, I want to cry. Babies, kids, elderly etc on the street. My god.
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Nobody owns property, they rent it from the government. Even if you paid your mortgage, but cant pay taxes, the government will kick you out. So much for freedom when you can't own your own home.
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What's disgusting is how they intentionally gave low income people mortgages banking on the owners to lose their homes and they could benefit from the owners losses. That just shows how evil money grabbers can be.
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That man was absolutely correct, “the government should have bailed out the people, the banks will always be ok”
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it should be illegal to put a mother with her kids on the street.
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She looks as though she is a grandmother taking care of her grandchildren. It is horrible, especially for the little children!
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The American Dream is just that,a dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it -George Carlin
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Fast Forward to July, 2019. I'm hoping that things have gotten better in the past seven years for Kenya and her children. In the meantime, I'll keep this family in my prayers.
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I would rather work 2-3 minimum wage jobs, before I would work as the person who has to evict families from there house. I would not be able to sleep at night.
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Bail out the Banks and GM that's good socialism, but when it comes to helping families that's bad socialism!
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Really even if pay off your home, you have a Deed, a Deed is not a Title, a deed is a contractional agreement between you and the state, county, ect. Really you pay for the House, you get the right to Manage it and pay yrly property taxes on it,, That's All you get the right to stay there, manage it and maintain it & pay taxes..
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The US is such a loan-based soceity. I realized when my friends in the US said they bought a car, house etc...it meant something totally different. In my home country, you bought a house or a car means you paid full cash for it. This is why in the US, almost anyone can buy a house or car, when in reality they truly cannot afford it or sustain it.
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When I was really poor I had 3 priorities. The first was food on the table, the second was rent, and the third was anything else we could afford. When I see families now-a-day getting evicted from a house I see them loading a nice car with all kinds of stuff I could only have dreamed of having when I was in that situation. Draw your own conclusion as to what I'm saying.
