by Anita Hill
Myth #1: Subprime borrowers were mainly investors and speculators.
Fact: 90 percent of subprime and high-cost loans to women were for owner-occupied properties (88 percent for all borrowers).
Myth #2: Subprime borrowers got into trouble because they “bought too much house.”
Fact: Only 44 percent of 2005–2006 subprime and high-cost loans for owner-occupied properties were for purchase—the rest were for refinance or home improvement loans.
In addition, for those who did purchase homes with subprime and high-cost loans, the loan amounts were modest. For women, median purchase loan = $140K, average = $181K.
For all subprime and high-cost loans, median purchase price = $145K, average = $186K—hardly the “McMansions” that have been highlighted in the media.28
Early on in the revelation of the crisis, many of us may have blamed the problem on greedy or irresponsible home buyers who were gaming the system to gain access to places they could not afford. But as we learned more about the enormity of the problem, a different picture emerged. Eventually the mainstream press revealed how female heads of households, whether living in communities of color or primarily white communities, were hit hardest by the burst in the housing bubble. The stability that home ownership promised to these women and their children had vanished. The combined impact of escalating payments and women’s typically lower incomes is devastating, even as the housing market recovers. As a 2010 report by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies suggests, “[T]he share of households spending more than half of their incomes on housing,” which has always been a concern of single women, will likely escalate.29 And in 2011, the press is reporting that even those who rent in devastated neighborhoods are at risk of having their belongings put out on the streets as landlords fail to meet mortgage payments.
The legal issue in the court cases is whether lenders targeted African Americans for toxic loans, and there is ample evidence that this is so. There is also evidence that women were targeted, though so far no major suit has been filed against lenders for gender discrimination. That this catastrophe came at a time when many Americans who had been left behind in their quest for the American Dream were starting to catch up makes it even more a crisis of the idea of home.
The issues facing women and people of color are not limited to those groups alone. Yet black women have a history of searching for a place to call home. In so many ways, they had been there before. In the past, black women watched as homes and farms were lost; they and their children were on the front lines of battles against discrimination. Even today they have stood up to keep their families and communities safe and have kept businesses open when patrons’ dollars dwindled. African American women know from these experiences that the impact of today’s disaster stretches beyond the immediate crisis for them and their extended families, reaching well into the future—that it is likely to set back generations to come by eating up savings for retirement and college.
Sandra Hines, a fifty-five-year-old black woman from Detroit, shared her story with the Applied Research Center for its 2009 report Race and Recession. The report’s account of how Hines lost her home—which she, her parents, and her two sisters had moved into when Sandra was eighteen—sums up the crisis of home:
“Our foreclosure was very brutal,” she said. “They busted up my mother’s antique furniture, our belongings that we had accumulated for 40 years.” The sheriff padlocked the door, and the Hines family was evicted. “We lost the home our parents bought,” she said. “Now we’ve lost all of it.”
When Hines’s middle sister lost her job at General Motors last year, “the family fell on hard times, and we refinanced the house,” said Hines. “But we had one of those [adjustable-rate mortgages], and the payment almost doubled. My sister wasn’t able to keep it up.” They received a notice informing them of their pending foreclosure.
After their eviction, Hines’s two sisters and her teenage niece moved into a rental. But shortly after, their landlord defaulted on his mortgage, and that house went into foreclosure, too. “We are facing double foreclosure,” she said.30
In a video, Sandra Hines stands in front of the home she lost and speaks of her feelings of “uprootedness.” This was supposed to be the home passed on to children and grandchildren. This was the place she imagined when she thought of “home.” Her words have a familiar ring, reminding me of families a hundred years earlier in a place hundreds of miles away. I think of my grandparents, Henry and Ida Elliott, and their departure from Arkansas and the farm that they must have thought would one day pass to children and grandchildren. I think of the thousands of others like Hines and like the Elliotts, and I ponder whether African Americans have once again been called upon to reimagine their homes and reassess their gains toward equality. The fact that they are being joined by millions of other Americans of all races makes the prospect no less disquieting.
An Awfully Big Mess
A projected one million homes will be foreclosed on in 2011. What started in poor neighborhoods in Baltimore has spread to glitzy Las Vegas, to rust-belt Detroit, to coastline Florida, and to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. A virus first unleashed on poor, minority communities has become an all-embracing pandemic, infecting without regard for race, class, or geography. Whether foreclosures result from the default of subprime or prime loans, the crisis goes back to the “subprime lending spree” that Mayor Dixon complained about in 2008. Ultimately, “those people,” “granny,” and even women in all income brackets were not enough to feed the growth that bankers like Richard Kovacevich found “exciting.” Condemning statements about people who “didn’t pay their bills” became self-fulfilling prophesies for a whole host of folks. And the resulting problems are both legal and social, as enormous amounts of wealth have been drained from households throughout the country; no one can escape the consequences. The situation is, in the words of one Securities and Exchange Commission official, “an awfully big mess.”31 In its report The State of Working America, the Economic Policy Institute concluded:
With the bursting of the housing bubble, the decline in the stock market, and the weakness of the labor market, household wealth has taken a substantial hit in the Great Recession. The median net worth of whites fell by around a third from 2004 to 2007, dropping from around $150,000 to around $100,000. The median wealth of blacks, historically much lower than that of whites, took an even bigger hit, dropping by over three-quarters, from around $10,000 to around $2,000.32
For many, J. T. Adams’s definition of the American Dream, the “dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall . . . be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position,” was eviscerated by the recent lending debacle and subsequent recession. Perhaps the hardest hit is the generation of children whose unfortunate circumstance is to be left homeless or in neighborhoods that are on the brink of complete dissolution. As a result of the housing crisis, everyone’s belief in the promises of our democracy is shaken. To be effective, to restore that lost sense of both a place to call home and the state of being at home in our nation, our response must take into account persistent and pernicious biases that have destroyed the American Dream for so many and thereby weakened our democracy. At this point in our history, our collective reimagining of the American Dream should be led by the country’s foremost symbol of racial progress and equality, Barack Obama. And he should begin this daunting task by responding not just to the foreclosure crisis but to the crisis of home, by facing squarely the thorny question of what it takes for every American to be at home in our great country.
Chapter 8. Home at Last: Toward an Inclusive Democracy
Home: 1. A lens through which one can safely view the world.
2. A place where one’s ideas, experiences, and work are seen as valuable and one’s body (physical being) and identity are welcome.
3. An i
deal state of being, as much as a place, which is reimagined for each generation.
A. H.
As distressing and seemingly endless as the current crisis of home is, we can learn from it. But the critical lessons are the ones that will prevent a similar crisis from happening again, not the ones that will offer short-term solutions. As difficult as it may seem in the midst of crisis, we must be willing to face some unattractive truths and ask some difficult questions. Through home ownership, we put a market value on the American Dream and gave little thought to the larger meaning of home in America. When the financial industry collapsed, many found themselves priced out of a sense of safety, security, and being a part of American life. Others not only lost those aspects of home, but also saw their pathway to equality vanish. In moving forward, we must address the bias and community detachment at the heart of what Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz called the “epicenter of the crisis”: subprime mortgages.1 At this juncture we must ask ourselves and our leaders: Can we ever restore the place of the home in the dream in our democracy? How can we make the American Dream of having a place to which we belong a dream that is inclusive and sustainable, both socially and economically? What vision of home will replace our prevailing notions?
A New Narrative
As we enter the second full decade of the twenty-first century, it is time for a new narrative, one whose central ideas are place and belonging. An ideology of mobility has prevailed throughout America’s history. Women like Abigail Adams abandoned their loyalties to the places of their forebears and helped establish the United States, only to be left out of the U.S. Constitution. From the seventeenth century and the beginning of what historian Ira Berlin calls a “massive relocation” of Africans to the shores of the Virginia Colony, movement has characterized the black American experience.2 Early in the twentieth century, as African Americans journeyed from the rural South to cities in the Midwest, in the Northeast, and on the West Coast, Booker T. Washington urged blacks to find equality in those new locations by establishing homes and becoming model neighbors. As the century advanced, women ventured outside the home to the public spheres of the workplace and political arenas in search of gender equality and economic freedom. Nannie Helen Burroughs demanded that women be allowed to earn a living and take their place alongside men in the world. In 1964, when President Johnson signed comprehensive legislation outlawing discrimination, both women and blacks found new power in a system governed by civil rights. Yet in many ways, equality eludes us still. We still search for it.
As a self-identified African American man, whose fervent search for home brought him to the presidency, Barack Obama must be the architect of a twenty-first-century vision of equality—not only as a story of movement, but also one of place—embracing belonging, not mere tolerance—a narrative of community as well as rights. This is the narrative that for decades, pioneers in the struggle for equality have attempted to pen. The story of place is the account of our democratic society that Abigail Adams urged upon her husband, John, and that Nannie Helen Burroughs and Booker T. Washington advocated to and for their followers—female and male, black and white. Adams, Washington, and Burroughs found equality in the ability to stay, not in the right to escape. In sum, we must begin to reimagine equality as Abigail Adams did, with all women as equals, having full authority within the home and full citizenship under the law; as Booker T. Washington did, with people of color as welcome neighbors, not as community outcasts; as Nannie Helen Burroughs did, with women’s work inside and outside the home deemed both socially and economically valuable.
Dreams from his Childhood
In a now-familiar black-and-white photograph taken in 1996 by Mariana Cook, Barack and Michelle Obama sit on a spare but comfortable-looking sofa in the Hyde Park apartment where they made their home. Behind them are what appear to be Indonesian prints. A lone statue on an end table looks to be from Africa, possibly Kenya, and the thin, rustic rug under their feet could have originated in any number of locations along the Silk Road. All suggest Barack Obama’s journey to the place that he would call home and where he would meet his wife-to-be, Michelle Robinson, a Windy City native and fellow Harvard Law School graduate.
Cook, an Ansel Adams protégé, photographed and interviewed the Obamas among a group of intellectuals she planned to feature in Couples: Speaking from the Heart, a book exploring marriage. Their portraits didn’t make it into the book, but were found on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration. It’s unlikely that at the time, Cook had any idea that she was talking to a future president and First Lady of the United States. He speaks about stitching together his family through “stories . . . memories . . . ideas.” Michelle, he notes, represents a different “strand of family life.” His own is “traveling” and “mobile.” Hers is “very stable, two-parent . . . mother at home . . . living in the same house all their lives.” He lapses nostalgic, “imagining what it would be like to have a stable, solid, secure family life.” In the end, he relishes the “tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong.”3 Ultimately, one supposes, it was his comfort with the mystery and the willingness to take audacious chances that led to his becoming the leader of the free world just twelve years later. But one could just as easily conclude that it was Michelle Obama’s stability that enabled his meteoric ascent.
As the leader of a country struggling to restore its full faith in the American Dream, President Obama can do no less than focus his energy on our larger aspirations and what it takes for all of us to be at home in America. But we must all face a reality: the story of our future will not be the narrative of “mother at home” and may not be one of buying a home and staying in it all our lives, but can and must be one of security, trust, and mutual support. In her journal article “What is the Point of Equality?” philosopher Elizabeth S. Anderson frames the president’s challenge well. President Obama, she writes, must help us all to imagine equality as life in a nation where individuals receive “fair value for [their] labor, and recognition by others of [their] productive contribution,” where everyone has effective means of accessing and sustaining shelter, and whose members enjoy “the social condition of being accepted by others . . . not being ascribed outcast status.”4 This unique moment in time, and his own personal history, position Barack Obama to address this challenge in a way that perhaps no other president in recent history could.
The Road Home
Barack Obama’s life story is a tale of race, gender, and finding home. In reading his memoir, Dreams from My Father, I am reminded of my colleague Tara Brown and how she defined home: “For me, home is identity.”
Tara was born in 1966. Her Irish-English-American mother and African American father married in the early days of the 1960s social revolutions that called into question a host of perceived wisdoms. In particular, Tara’s parents believed that they were entering an age in which race would cease to be an issue. At the very least—like Barack Obama’s parents, who had been married a few years earlier in Hawaii—the couple believed that their love for each other would help them overcome any stigma that might be attached to an interracial family. Consequently, they never discussed race with Tara and their two other children.
In the winter of 1976, when the Browns moved to West Medford, a Boston suburb, the family lived for the first time in a predominantly black neighborhood. What’s more, they arrived during the area’s heated battles over school integration. White classmates and local residents whispered, snickered, and hurled racial slurs at Tara. The ten-year-old was forced to reckon with race, a concept that she hadn’t known existed. Moreover, her race was assigned to her. “I’d been labeled, tied, and bound to an identity,” one Tara hadn’t chosen. For her African American friends and their parents, there was no such thing as biracial. Just as convinced as their white neighbors of Tara’s identity, but more patient and welcoming, they were content to wait for her “to come to terms with and accept [her] Afri
can heritage.”
In the absence of her parents’ guidance, Tara was left on her own to figure out what being a black female meant. So during the summer of 1978, the twelve-year-old, who would one day become an academic, checked books out of the library, hoping to find answers in literary and historical works. For weeks Tara holed up in her bedroom reading Richard Wright’s Native Son and Black Boy, Toni Morrison’s Sula, and Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. She emerged as a person with a proud history, “profoundly and irreversibly connected to the black community.”
Tara’s brother, just eleven months older, evolved differently. “I’m just American,” he tells her now. The place and time demanded that Tara embrace her identity as a black woman, even with its burdens. But she allows that in the heat of the era’s racial battles, and even in their wake, it might have been too hard for her brother to take on the weight of being a black man.
In his remarkably revealing memoir, Barack Obama brings the reader along with him as he journeys to the place where he would come to terms with what it means to be a black man in America. He chronicles his life as the son of a largely absent black Kenyan father and a white American mother with whom he traveled the world and whose parents took Barack in for much of his childhood. In each location of his early life, his racial identity was always a source of tension that he had to negotiate, often on his own. The future president reveals a longing for a black male role model in his early life.
In 1985 Obama found a job as a community organizer, and, through his work and the people and communities he worked with, he fit into a location in a way he had not previously experienced. The place was Chicago. In Dreams, Obama credits the stories that he and the residents of Chicago’s South Side exchanged with giving him “the sense of place and purpose [he’d] been looking for.”5 The feelings engendered there brought him “out of the larger sense of isolation” surrounding much of his life to a state of belonging and shared interests. The Chicago experience also helped Obama situate himself in the struggle for racial equality in America.