Foreclosed America

From 2007 to 2012, almost five percent of American adultsabout ten million peoplelost their homes because they could not make mortgage payments. The scale of this home mortgage crisis is unprecedentedand it's not over. Foreclosures still displace more American homeowners every year than at any time before the twenty-first century. The dispossession and forced displacement of American families affects their health, educational success, and access to jobs. It continues to block any real recovery in the hardest-hit communities.

While we now know a lot about how this crisis affected the global economy, we still know very little about how it affected the people who lost their homes.Foreclosed America offers the first representative portrait of those peoplewho they are, how and where they live after losing their homes, and what they have to say about their finances, their neighborhoods, and American politics. It is a sobering picture of Americans down on their luck, and of a crisis that is testing American democracy.

Isaac William Martin is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. Christopher Niedt is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hofstra University.