No abstract

In this paper we offer a conceptualization of mortgage foreclosure as serial displacement by highlighting the current crisis in the context of historically repeated extraction of capital-economic, social, and human-from communities defined at different scales: geographically, socially, and that of embodied individuals. We argue that serial displacement is the loss of capital, physical resources, social integration and collective capacity, and psycho-social resources at each of these scales, with losses at one level affecting other levels. The repeated extraction of resources has negative implications for the health of individuals and groups, within generations as well as across generations, through the accumulation of loss over time. Our analysis of the foreclosure crisis as serial displacement for African American households in the United States begins with the "housing niche" model. We focus on the foreclosure crisis as an example of the interconnectedness of structured inequality in health and housing. Then we briefly review the history of policies related to racial inequality in homeownership in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. We end with an analysis of the scales of displacement and the human, social, and capital asset extraction that accompany them.

This article explores the contributions of neoliberal practice to the expansion of homeownership and the foreclosure crisis to illuminate the contradictions between the rhetorical goals of homeownership and the actual experiences of new homeowners. In doing so we explore the theories and practices that homeowners deploy to try to survive and keep their lives together. First, we review the aspects of housing policy in neoliberal regimes that led many of the homeowners we studied into both homeownership and foreclosure. In the second part, we analyze conversations from 14 focus groups in five cities with homeowners threatened with foreclosure to understand how neoliberal rhetoric and practices participated in their buying and potentially losing their homes and how they come to understand and act on their experiences of threat and failure. We conclude by redefining the foreclosure crisis and discussing the political moment of challenge to neoliberalism it created.