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How Real Estate Came to Own Us
by Alyssa Katz
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 Street 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.
"Starred Review. Richly detailed analysis of the recent (and ignominious) history of the American real estate market ... Katz writes with authority and empathy." - Publishers Weekly
"Our Lot is a sobering account of the origins of our current mortgage crisis. Katz methodically, and with great precision, traces the roots of homeownership in American society. Leaving few stones unturned, Our Lot provides an incisive analysis of the rational and speculative decisions that have made America so susceptible to the twists and turns of the housing industry. The book is a timely historical account, but its lessons are clear and penetrating for the contemporary era." - Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for a Day
This information about Our Lot was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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