“Not what it used to be”: Schemas of class and contradiction in the Great Recession

Abstract

The U.S. housing crisis and Great Recession (2007–9) significantly exacerbated 40 years of rising inequality in America. Widespread concern about the “struggling middle class” epitomizes Americans' anxiety about inequality and the country's claim to great nationhood. This article provides ethnographically grounded analysis of the restructuring of class experiences and discourses in Michigan in 2009 and 2010, from the perspectives of homeowners facing foreclosure and of nonprofit housing counselors who mediate between homeowners and their banks. First I examine homeowners' downward mobility, then I turn to all participants' analyses of the American class system. Most homeowners facing foreclosure emphasized their fall from the middle class to poverty or an in‐between status like “middle working poor.” Such complex self‐locations are not only about class shame or the inadequacy of American class discourse; they are also about maintaining citizenship status. When Michiganders identify as “middle working poor” and other permutations, they struggle to reconcile downward mobility with claims to current rights and their own history as the emblem of the American middle class. Homeowners and housing counselors also tied current class polarization to the long‐term decline of the manufacturing economy and American greatness. Their perception that being middle class is “not what it used to be” underscores the ongoing importance of the mid‐20th century to definitions of the middle class as financially secure. These experiences show simultaneous angst over and normalization of inequality. Because of the centrality of middle‐classness to affirmative citizenship in the United States, the hollowing out of the middle class is experienced as a citizenship of lack and contradiction.

Modifying the American Dream: An Ethnography of Foreclosure Prevention in the Great Recession

“…The small but significant body of qualitative research on foreclosures in the United States (Castro Baker & Keene, 2016;Jefferson, 2013aJefferson, , 2013bJefferson, , 2015Fields, Libman & Saegert, 2010;Ross, 2009;Stout, 2015Stout, , 2016 consistently finds that facing foreclosure was:…”

“…Progression from renting to owning one's home is also central to this transformation into adulthood and full American citizenship (Perin, 1977). The discourse of "achieving" the American Dream signals that class mobility is a one-way street in the United States -only and ever upward, despite lived experiences to the contrary (Jefferson, 2015;Pattillo, 2007)-.…”

“Homes with Value”: Mortgage Finance and the Reconfiguration of Home Value in Urban Mexico

“…And the ballooning mortgage debt associated with the home transforms it into an instance of what Berlant refers to as “cruel optimism,” wherein the object of one’s desire becomes an obstacle to one’s flourishing (2011). The promise of patrimonio is inverted as the mortgages that were supposed to provide the means for building wealth and enhancing class‐status are converted into debt burdens that instead become a source of economic insecurity and immobility (Jefferson 2015; García‐Lamarca & Kalika 2016).…”

Mothering in an Increasingly Uncertain Economic Marketplace: Revisiting the Call for Broader Conceptualizations of Parenthood and Paid Work

“…Middle and upper-class parents consciously make possible children's participation in organized extracurricular activities, are active with children in the home, and monitor their activities and promote children's long term success (Lareau, 2003). In light of recent economic changes and downturns, however, there is an intense anxiety among the middle-class in particular when it comes to preserving their class advantage (Cohen, 2015;Jefferson, 2015;Walsh, 2015). Motherhood today has an increasingly intensive end point, then; it is not merely giving one's all to one's children, but it involves doing in order to secure successful futures through intensive, extensive, and expanded mothering throughout a child's life (Nelson, 2010).…”