Dream It, Own It

Genealogies of Speculation and Dispossession in the Valley

It was a bright spring afternoon, and a deer ran across David Sanchez's gravel road as I pulled through the gate. Empty horse corrals lined his driveway, where his faded red Ford pickup was parked. Inside, his house was dim and musty, each room cluttered with exotic knickknacks, handmade stone sculptures, and painting supplies. A xylophone, the size of a love seat, dominated the living room. Balding on top, with his curly gray hair pulled into a ponytail, David, a sixty-eight-old veteran, had a charming smile, an easy laugh, and a soft, ironic tone of voice that kept even the most disheartening conversations upbeat.

As David fed his three cats, wiry strays from the surrounding hills, on the kitchen counter, he explained how "a street-smart Chicano from East L.A. ended up in Sacramento." David told me he had had a good job in Los Angeles as a factory manager, but his first wife had succumbed to drug and alcohol addiction shortly after their daughter was born. His older brother had secured a stable manufacturing job in the Sacramento Valley, and on his advice David, then in his early twenties, moved there so that his young daughter could have a fresh start. In Sacramento, he worked in manufacturing, but after the factories shut down, David reinvented himself as a video tech for a community college, where he landed a job in the 1990s.

Working at the college, David met Karen, a gentle and hardworking white school counselor fifteen years his junior. Karen, originally from Santa Barbara, had traveled north to attend Sacramento State. After graduating, she had taken a position counseling students and coordinating adult night courses; they met when David was hired as a video technician and used his position to develop an arts curriculum for the adult program. After some back-and-forth, the couple settled into a relationship. They traveled, rode horses (Karen was an avid equestrian), and spent time with friends. In their social circle, David said, the couple developed a reputation for lighting up a room whenever they walked in together.

After five years, in 2001, they married. David described his outdoor wedding to "the love of my life" as he led me to a parade of photographs hanging in his hallway. In my favorite photo, Karen smiled straight into the camera, her mouth caught wide in mid-laugh, while David stood with his gaze fixed adoringly on his bride and his hands awkwardly angling toward her trim waist. The sun setting over the foothills cast shadows over their guests standing in the background.

Soon after, Karen was diagnosed with an aggressive ovarian cancer. They were living in what David called their "safety home," a two-bedroom house they bought after the wedding. It was nothing like the house they had imagined living in. "My wife had survived the first operation and chemo," David explained, "and she was looking dazed." On a mission to return some of the vitality cancer had stolen, David found their dream home four blocks away, a four-bedroom California ranch-style house nestled in the woods back from a country road. "It was a fixer-upper; it needed some TLC. And it had room for Karen's horses." David secured a loan through Countrywide Financial, and they borrowed $15,000 from a friend for the down payment. The couple signed a contract in 2004.

When the payments ballooned, their new mortgage stretched the couple financially. Karen had stopped working when she started chemotherapy, and they were barely scraping by on David's income. When they bought the house, they agreed, David joked, that they wouldn't eat for ten years, but if they qualified for the mortgage, they qualified. The market had been going up for years; property was a sound investment. Besides, Karen had fallen in love with the place, declaring it her dream home, and David was desperate "to give her something to live for."

For David and Karen, a home purchase was much more than a commodity or a sound investment; it represented a second chance at a life that seemed suddenly all too fragile. David described the purchase as emotionally driven, one that would give them a place where they could be together "with room to breathe." Like David and Karen, most homeowners I came to know in the Sacramento Valley described their motivation for homeownership as a combination of emotion and finances: a graduation into adulthood, a place to grow a family, a stable ground to live out the golden years. An empty structure, a dwelling, became the scaffolding that would support tremendous psychic weight and was infused with a magical power to give a child solid footing or to save a life. These visions of homeownership, enabled by a financial exchange but not determined by it, would later encourage people to rethink the moral valence of debt repayment as foreclosures overtook the Sacramento Valley.

POSTWAR AMERICAN DREAMS

Lenders and loan servicers consistently perpetuated the idea that homeownership could cure the tragedies of modern life. Advertising campaigns selling mortgages promised familial bliss, personal belonging, and financial stability. In the Sacramento Valley, this sentiment imbued the marketing tag lines of mortgage lenders: "Dream it, own it." "Impossible." "Move up." "You're too smart to rent." Kinship references abounded; in these advertisements, babies, young children, and women either holding newborns or about to give birth were familiar tropes. Another advertising angle emphasized a link between homeownership and unlimited possibility. One Wells Fargo television spot from 2013 intercut scenes of the Wright brothers, Rosa Parks, a NASA control room erupting into cheers as a rover lands on Mars, and a newborn baby as a way to link, in the space of sixty seconds, mortgage lending with a broader dream of American possibility.

If the American Dream was grounded in the ideology that hard work guarantees opportunities for the good life, possession of a house was the post–World War II embodiment of that ideal. This imagined role of the home as a respite from the cold, hard calculations of the public sphere was already rooted in nineteenth-century notions of public and private divides under industrial capitalism, but it took on a new sheen as the suburbs expanded after World War II. After the war, the federal government fueled the growth of the suburbs by using tax policies to encourage developers to build large-scale suburban neighborhoods on farmland. To help Americans to buy these homes, the government insured mortgages and built highways connecting commuters with the city centers where they worked. The new houses in these sprawling suburbs needed to be filled, in turn promoting a...