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Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us Paperback – Bargain Price, July 6, 2010

4.4 out of 5 stars 9 customer reviews

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Paperback, Bargain Price, July 6, 2010
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (July 6, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1608192059
  • ASIN: B005Q69JJQ
  • Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,687,280 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

By William W. Thomas on June 28, 2009
Format: Hardcover
If you are at all curious about how we got to the disaster we currently face in the housing market, this is an excellent overview. It puts the current crisis into a broad context, showing how even well-intentioned changes in housing policy decades in the past created the breeding ground for the housing bubble and accompanying toxic mortgage debt crisis. "Our Lot" is effective both on the macro and micro level - Alyssa Katz handles both complicated policy histories and tragic personal stories of people caught up in the housing bubble with sensitivity and depth. She also raises some fundamental questions about the "American Dream" of home ownership, and whether we need some new dreams. A great work of journalism.
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Format: Hardcover
This book is right up there with John Talbot's books in detailing the causes and the effects of the housing bubble on America. It is a "page turner" that names names, and examines in depth the gullibility of Americans who should have known much better, for "get-rich-quick" Ponzi schemes that simply made no sense even if they did have the imprimater of Alan Greenspan and both Republican and Democratic presidents. Perhaps most important, Alyssa Katz shows us why the housing crash will not be going away anytime soon as it's ultimate evil was that it converted us into a nation of debters who voluntarily sold themselves literally into debt/wage slavery and inevitably poverty while enriching a small number of creditors.
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Format: Hardcover
"Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us" by Alyssa Katz, a liberal journalist and NYU journalism professor who writes for Mother Jones, is the best book yet on how the sacred cause of "diversity" merged with pedal-to-the-metal capitalism to bring us the Great Mortgage Meltdown.

The book hasn't garnered the attention it deserves -- probably because it makes clear the bipartisan responsibility of both her opponents on the Right and her friends on the Left.

Our Lot focuses equally on the misdeeds of both capitalists and leftists. But I won't give the boiler room boys as much attention in this review because they're a more familiar tale, while Katz's reporting on the role of her side is compelling "testimony against interest".

Katz is remarkably frank about how government programs and political pressure to boost minority homeownership helped blow up the economy. She's particularly good at explicating how leftist housing activists, such as ACORN and Gale Cincotta, the godmother of the Community Reinvestment Act, worked with Democratic politicians such as Bill Clinton, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, and Jim Johnson, CEO of Fannie Mae, to lay the groundwork for the Bubble and Bust.

Katz doesn't devote quite as much depth to the Bush Administration's culpability (which, to my mind, is even greater). Perhaps she lacked Republican contacts to give her the kind of inside story she got on her own party's mistakes.

Still, Our Lot makes clear that on housing policy, the Clinton-Bush years form a single continuum with one overarching plan: boost the minority homeownership rate by lowering credit standards. I call it the Era of Multi-Culti Capitalism.

And there's little reason to think that its lessons have been learned yet.
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Format: Hardcover
I have read many well written books and this tome ranks highly among them. Ms. Katz digs deep into the underlying causes of the current economic morass that our nation is languishing through. She uses many factual accounts to help illustrate the machinations that brought us to this point. As a conservative, conventional homeowner I was mystified by how so many people got into so much trouble through the acquisition of a property. As a 401k/403b holder I was also stupefied by how my investments could tank so hard & so very rapidly. Ms. Katz explains just how this could, and did, happen. Her writing is direct and to the point but flows well and is an easy read for such a technical work. I have to admit to still being somewhat confused, but I fear that is on account of my understanding and not her writing. I only hope that Barney Frank and most of our other legislators take the time to read this work. Well done, Ms. Katz. What is your next challenge?
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Format: Kindle Edition
Author Katz has written a fine book. Well researched, reasoned, and told. Unfortunately, no one will pay heed. History not only repeats it shows a direct and line between cause and effect. In the case of every financial crisis it comes down to debt. Katz's history lesson begins in FDR's administration when debt, specifically, housing debt went mainstream and socially acceptable.

Credit and debt arguably propelled us forward but imagine if you were only allowed to buy what you could afford. Would the richest class be even less than 1% and would life today be more like 1935 or 2015? I know, I am getting a "little out there" but it is worthy of exploration. This book was written shortly after our latest financial crisis and the dust had not yet really cleared. All we know is a bunch of instruments in the form of securitization of really bad debt will not pay.

The book looks at the human cost of such actions which tries to make it personal but the macro and micro never really meet. I credit Katz with attempting to warn us of future calamity but human nature abhors a vacuum and that vacuum is made of up conflicting wants and needs, risks and rewards, foibles and facts.
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