Translated from Spanish, and originally published under Vidas Hipotecadas. About the organizing strategies of the PAH, Plataforma De Afectados Por La Hipoteca.

The fiasco that sank millions of Americans, including one journalist, who thought he knew better. A veteran New York Times economics reporter, Ed Andrews was intimately aware of the dangers posed by easy mortgages from fast-buck lenders. Yet, at the promise of a second chance at love, he succumbed to the temptation of subprime lending and became part of the economic catastrophe he was covering. In surprisingly short order, he amassed a staggering amount of debt and reached the edge of bankruptcy. In Busted, Andrew bluntly recounts his misadventures in mortgages and goes one step further to describe the brokers, lenders, Wall Street players, and Washington policymakers who helped bring that money to his door. The result is a penetrating and often acerbic look at the binge and bust that nearly bankrupted the United States. Enabled by know-nothing complacency in Washington, Wall Street wizards used "collateralized debt obligations," "conduits," and other inscrutable financial "innovations" to put American home financing into hyperdrive. Millions of Americans abandoned the safety of thirty-year, fixed-rate mortgages and loaded up on debt. While regulators insisted that the markets knew best, Wall Street firms fragmented and repackaged unsound loans into securities that the rating agencies stamped with triple-A seals of approval. Andrews describes a remarkably democratic debacle that made fools out of people up and down the financial food chain. From a confessional meeting with Alan Greenspan to a trek through the McMansion bubble of the OC, he maps the arc of the Frankenstein loans that brought the American economy to the brink. With on-the-ground reporting from the frothiest quarters of the crisis, Andrews locates what is likely to be the high-water mark in America's long-term embrace of higher borrowing, higher risk-taking, and the fervent belief in the possibility of easy profits.

Have you ever thought about real estate investing as a path to financial freedom? Have you kicked around the idea but felt you were too busy with work and family responsibilities?If so, One Rental at a Time will transform your life, just as it has transformed my life and the lives of thousands of others.This book reveals how buying and holding rental properties will create a second income that can, in time, allow you to quit your day job. It worked for me and it can work for you too. What's stopping you? Read the book and learn how One Rental at a Time can lead to financial independence.

Our Lot tells how an entire nation got swept up in real estate mania, and it casts the business story--the collapse of the subprime empire and the global impact it had on the economy--as part of a project of social engineering beginning in the 1930s by the U.S. government to make homeownership available to those who had never been able to attain it before. Based on original reporting, Our Lot does not dwell on the foibles of executives. It looks at the boom as experienced by ordinary Americans, and examines how our own economic anxieties and realities helped fuel the real estate bubble. Conveyed in accessible language and through narrative reporting, the book looks to help homeowners and would-be homeowners understand what really happened, how it has affected our homes and communities, and how we can move on into a future we'll want to live in.

Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People tells the previously untold stories of those living with mortgage debt in times of precarity and explores how individualized indebtedness can unite resistance in the struggle toward housing justice. The book builds on several years of Melissa García-Lamarca’s engagement with activist research in Barcelona’s housing movement, in particular with its most prominent collective, the Platform for Mortgage-Affected People (PAH). What García-Lamarca learned from fellow activists and the movement in Barcelona pushed her to rethink how lived experiences of indebtedness connect to larger political- economic processes related to housing and debt. The book is also inspired by feminist scholars who integrate the lens of everyday life into explorations of contemporary political economy and by anthropologists who connect macroprocesses to lived experience. Distinctive in how it integrates a racialized, gendered, and decolonial perspective, García-Lamarca’s research of mortgaged lives in precarious times explores two principal phenomena: first, how financial speculation is experienced in the day-to-day and differentially embedded in the dynamics of (urban) capital accumulation, and second, how collective action can unleash the liberating possibility of indebtedness.