Safe as Houses: Financialization, Foreclosure, and Precarious Homeownership in the United States
中文摘要
美国经济的金融化对家庭福祉产生了重要影响，但将金融化与不稳定性联系起来的机制尚未得到充分识别。本研究将住房抵押贷款止赎确定为一个联结宏观层面金融化与房主所面临一系列下游后果的关键环节，并提出两个问题：(1) 抵押贷款证券化——金融化的一项关键技术——如何促成了新的止赎做法；(2) 这些做法如何影响面临止赎风险的房主的住房不稳定性。为回答这些问题，我分析了法院记录、对关键参与者的访谈以及一手文献资料，以考察1992年至2006年间伊利诺伊州库克县住房抵押贷款止赎的演变。我发现，随着抵押贷款证券化改变了借款人与贷款人之间的社会和经济关系，止赎被积极地加以管理，既被视为成本的驱动因素，也被视为利润的来源，而贷款管理人及其律师则致力于削减成本高昂的借款人保护措施。这些变化使止赎更加频繁、更加迅速，从而加剧了住房不稳定性。
Abstract
The financialization of the U.S. economy has had important implications for household well-being, but the mechanisms connecting financialization and precarity have not been fully identified. This research identifies mortgage foreclosure as a nexus connecting macro-level financialization to an array of downstream consequences for homeowners and asks (1) how mortgage securitization, a key technology of financialization, enabled new foreclosure practices; and (2) how these practices affect housing precarity among homeowners at risk of foreclosure. To answer these questions, I analyze court records, interviews with key participants, and primary source documents to examine the evolution of mortgage foreclosure in Cook County, Illinois, from 1992 to 2006. I find that as mortgage securitization transformed the social and economic relations between borrowers and lenders, foreclosure became actively managed as both a driver of costs and a source of profits, and loan administrators and their attorneys worked to reduce costly borrower protections. These changes increased housing precarity by making foreclosure more frequent and more rapid.