Doctoral Dissertation Research: Factors Contributing to the Efficacy of Mortgage-Based Homeownership Initiatives

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Since the post-war period, scholars and policy makers have understood homeownership to be a key factor in breaking the cycle of poverty. Indeed, the idea that owning a house confers enormous benefits on poor families, and that mortgages are the best way to do this, has become a central assumption in poverty-reduction strategies the world over. And yet, the 2007-2008 financial crisis in the United States crucially questioned whether homeownership was reliably a worthwhile goal for low-income families, who disproportionately suffered and lost in the crisis. This project, which trains a student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, explores the extent to which homeownership is effective in breaking the cycle of poverty, and in what exact terms, is fundamental to the construction of effective policies that truly promote socioeconomic wellbeing. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, findings will be disseminated to organizations and individuals exploring what factors promote or hinder families' ability to harness homeownership to break the cycle of poverty. Inés Escobar Gonzalez, under the supervision of Dr. Stephan Palmié of the University of Chicago, explores what socioeconomic and cultural factors contribute to the success or failure of mortgage-based homeownership initiatives. The research will be conducted in Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, a municipality in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara in western Mexico. This is a particularly apt research setting because, since 2001, it has been the site of a government program that dramatically expanded mortgage-based homeownership rates amongst a diverse pool of lower-income families, resulting in various levels of case-based success. Therefore, the research setting will allow for a precise comparative study into the exact ways mortgages and mortgage-based homeownership are impacting the lives of different kinds of lower-income families, all while assessing the crucial explanatory variables that define people's ability to make and maintain assets. Based on a strategic comparative sample, the investigators will construct 36 case studies that comprise contrasting household structures, employment profiles, and income and asset histories, thus elucidating how different families are processually enabled and constrained by mortgage-based homeownership. The project will contribute to anthropological discussions about neoliberalism, economic anthropological debates about value and moral economies, and cross-disciplinary research on the relationship between debt, sociality, and property.