Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us »

Alyssa Katz teaches journalism at New York University and works as an editorial consultant with the Pratt Center for Community Development. Formerly the editor of City Limits, a magazine about New York City and its neighborhoods, she currently writes for Mother Jones, New York, The Big Money, and other publications. Alyssa lives in Brooklyn, in a co-op apartment that she owns.

How the homes we live in turned into the monsters that ate our economy and how the United States became a nation obsessed with real estate.

Our Lot tells how an entire nation got swept up in real estate mania, and it casts the business story—the collapse of the mortgage markets and its global impact on the economy—as the product of a decades-long project of social engineering by the U .S. government to make homeownership possible for those who had never been able to attain it before. Based on original reporting, Our Lot looks at the boom as experienced by ordinary Americans, and examines how our own economic anxieties and realities, combined with greed and delusion on Wall S treet and in Washington, inflated the real estate bubble. In accessible language, the book helps homeowners and would-be homeowners understand what really happened, how it has affected our homes and communities, and how we can move on to a future we’ll want to live in.

The Barnes & Noble Review

A story as big as our recent real estate meltdown must contain thousands of smaller stories, filled with heroes and villains, wrong turns and missed opportunities. Alyssa Katz begins Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, her enlightening investigation of the housing bubble and ensuing bust, with Gale Cincotta, a Chicago housewife turned neighborhood activist. Cincotta gained national prominence -- and hero status -- fighting the practice of redlining, the refusal of mortgage lenders to loan to minorities and the poor. During the 1970s, she and her allies helped pass the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which forced banks to reveal where they made their loans, and the Community Reinvestment Act, which required them to meet the lending needs of all segments of their communities. In 1988 she and hundreds of activists stormed the Washington headquarters of Fannie Mae to demand that the government-subsidized mortgage buyer invest in low-income neighborhoods.

Contents 1. Almost like a Conspiracy....................1
2. The Rising Tide....................27
3. Subprime Time....................54
4. Into Oblivion....................78
5. Reaching the Limits....................102
6. Crime Spree....................129
7. Huffing the Fumes....................156
8. Tenants No More....................185
Epilogue: Returning Home....................213
Acknowledgments....................229
Glossary....................233
Notes....................245
Index....................000