“You are the architect of your own success”: Selling financial freedom through real estate investment after the foreclosure crisis of 2008

Elizabeth Youngling

Economic Anthropology, 2020, vol. 7, issue 1, 108-119

Abstract: After the U.S. foreclosure crisis of 2008, residential real estate investment became a dubious financial strategy. But in the real estate investment seminars I attended in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs in 2014 and 2015, the housing market's recent collapse was being repackaged into a space for ordinary people to seize financial freedom and find opportunity in the wake of crisis. This article explores how real estate seminar speakers use the long‐standing cultural and economic valorization of residential real estate and the reality television–driven approachability of house flipping to turn the grim inequities the crisis produced into a platform for selling insider knowledge to people with limited financial resources and experience. I argue that the seminars offer a window into understanding how market logics of taking on risk to build wealth circulate and become incorporated into the financial subjectivities and dreams of both investors and ordinary people. Seminar speakers insist that just as devalued homes can become valuable assets, passive workers can transform themselves into empowered market makers. Their framings speak to the pervasive power of rags‐to‐riches stories in the United States and to the cyclical nature of market making and dissolution under capitalism.

Date: 2020
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