Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Pitti, Stephen
Abstract
This dissertation examines trends in Latine homeownership between 1970 and 2000. It describes how Latines became homeowners in the absence of targeted subsidy programs. In so doing, it tracks fundamental changes in housing markets and housing policy as the New Deal order crumbled and the so-called neoliberal order arose. The dissertation comprises three parts. Part One narrates the federal government’s retreat from fair housing in the 1970s at the same time that executive agencies “discovered” the dire housing conditions faced by Latines across the country. Part Two describes how Latine-led nonprofit organizations, particularly the National Council of La Raza, responded to these changes and tried to ameliorate worsening housing conditions in the 1980s. Part Three then examines how the Bush and Clinton administrations responded to the first decades-long drop in homeownership since the Great Depression. Relying on materials in national archives, university libraries, and local repositories, these three parts together consider the changed nature of federal housing policies, the influence of an emerging Latine elite, and the responses by community-based organizations to a stubborn housing crisis. The dissertation makes four arguments. First and foremost, it argues that the problem of Latine homeownership was really a problem of low-income homeownership. In that sense, this Latine history provides an excellent vantage point from which to see the remaking of the political economy of housing. Second, it argues that nonprofit organizations became leading providers of homeownership opportunity in the absence of a robust public sector in low-income housing; the public-private partnerships which characterized statecraft in the twentieth century became even more prominent. Third, it argues that, during the switch from the new-construction approach to the existing-stock approach to mass homeownership, the secondary market replaced the primary market as the locus of policymakers’ attention. Fourth, and finally, it argues that the meaning of homeownership changed in the late twentieth century. No longer did homeownership mean the purchase of a newly built home which would appreciate in value and become the bedrock of a family’s wealth. Instead, by 2000, homeownership became more accessible than ever because it constituted the purchase of aging, rickety homes in segregated neighborhoods which could rise as sharply as they fell in property values.
Recommended Citation
Ramirez, Gabriel Aron, "The Death of the American Dream, en Español: The Problem of Latine Homeownership in the Late Twentieth Century" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1344.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1344
