Walking away from an American Dream, or how a million strategic defaults helped America rethink homeownership

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the relationship between homeowners strategically defaulting on their mortgages and a public shift in the American Dream of homeownership. It argues that the spike in strategic defaults from 2007 to 2011 constituted de facto performative enthymemes about (1) the legitimacy of defaulting on a mortgage and (2) the American Dream of homeownership's declining cultural hegemony. National news reports identified the trend and filled in the enthymemes for a national audience. The enthymemes legitimized homeowners’ decisions to abandon their properties by treating homeownership as an investment, a move which utilized the neoliberal logic of capital against the interests of capital. This essay explains performative enthymemes, probes the cultural development of the American Dream of homeownership, and assesses the enthymemes produced by strategic defaults and outlined in national news reports.

Keywords:

• Homeownership
• Strategic Defaults
• American Dream
• Performative Enthymeme
• Investment

Acknowledgment

Dr. Abbott would like to thank Katie Langford and the anonymous reviewers of Argumentation and Advocacy for their insightful comments on this essay. He would also like to thank Erin Witte, Desiree Rowe, Michaela, Frischherz, Tim Barney, and Mari Lee Mifsud for their comments on earlier versions ove this essay. An earlier version of this essay was top paper in the Popular Communication Division at the Southern States Communication Association conference in 2011. An even earlier version of this essay was part of Dr. Abbott's dissertation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Blake Abbott

Blake Abbott (Ph.D. 2010, University of Georgia) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Towson University.