New Article: “The American Dream, Deferred: Contextualizing Property After the Foreclosure Crisis”

New Article: Priya S. Gupta, The American Dream, Deferred: Contextualizing Property After the Foreclosure Crisis, 73 Md. L. Rev. 523 (2014).  Abstract below:

In a few short years, the American Dream has dried up like a raisin in the sun. Massive foreclosures of the mid-to-late 2000s have left the status of the American Dream of homeownership in serious question. In this paper, I argue that in order to formulate new federal housing and homeownership policy goals, the underlying vision of property rights that informs such policy needs to be examined and re-oriented to one that recognizes the nature of property (specifically with regards to residences) as an interconnected and contextualized regime. In the decades following World War II, the federal government supported homeownership and egalitarian access to such ownership through legal regimes and rhetoric. The form this promotion took–the push for detached single-family houses–maps a model of property rights that values ownership, separation, autonomy, and a particular legitimate version of the “home.” Despite this promotion, just before and during the Foreclosure Crisis of the mid-2000s, the federal government surprisingly abandoned this rhetoric and paradigm by moving towards a different model of property rights that treated the house as a commodity, evaluated like an investment and bound by the four corners of its mortgage contract. From this model, it could comfortably limit people’s rights to their homes, especially for the ‘irresponsible borrowers’ amongst them. The use of both of these models has shifted the operation of property as a regime in the United States, and, as I argue, not for the better. After setting out this narrative, I argue for widening the context in which property rights, and therefore housing policy, are analyzed. I do not craft an entire alternate model of a property regime, but rather offer two perspectives that should, in part, constitute such a model (or models). In formulating these perspectives, I draw examples from the City of Baltimore to argue that property and housing policy should recognize (1) the interconnectedness of property as an institution and (2) the importance of the context in which the investment and contract surrounding a house were made.