Homeowners Shouldn’t Be Faulted for the Foreclosure Crisis
When a house is foreclosed on, the usual conversation follows the lines of faulting the individual for not being responsible and managing their money properly. But when the housing bubble burst in 2007 and hundreds of thousands of families began losing their homes, it was clear that something else was at play. To put it another way: Four million households can’t all have been at fault.
But, indeed, between 2007 and 2011, more than four million households were foreclosed on. During the crisis itself, however, not much attention was given to the people who lived in these homes. Seeking to right this wrong, David Dayen did what any journalist would do: He wrote a book. The resulting work, Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud, was the topic of discussion during a recent panel at New America where Dayen spoke to how the fraud came to be and why Congress failed to bail out homeowners.
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