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relative to middle-income, white and male borrowers—new research consistently finds subprime loans targeted marginalized social groups (HUD 2000; Wyly and Atia et al. 2006, 2007). Even when controlling for credit-scores and risk characteristics assigned to subprime borrowers, women and minorities are significantly over-represented in the pool of subprime mortgages (Fishbein and Woodall 2006).2 Moreover, this disparity is even more pronounced as income levels increase for women and minority households, as they are more likely to receive high-cost loans compared to white or male households with the same income level (Bocian, Ernst et al. 2006). According to Dymski, ‘a survey of 2005 and 2006 experience found that 55 and 61 per cent of those acquiring mortgages, respectively, had credit-scores high enough to obtain conventional loans’ (2009: 172). Greater access to subprime loans only provides a supply-side perspective; it does not adequately consider the wider factors contributing to the increased demand for credit. Alongside the supply-side dynamics there is a broader Politics of abandonment where low-income and socially marginalized groups are increasingly using high-cost debt to participate in homeownership but also to meet current consumption expenses and temporary financial shortfalls. The politics of abandonment of low-income households reflects the persistent re-structuring of government provisions for financial security, the gradual relinquishing of the business communities social responsibilities to provide employment, and the inability of large numbers of Americans to find affordable housing. According to the urban planner, Peter Marcuse (2009), there is not a single city in the United States, in which a full-time worker earning a minimum wage can afford even a 1-bedroom apartment, a situation from which African-Americans, Hispanics, immigrants and women suffer in grossly disproportionate numbers. Against the background of a limited rise in wages and the ideological myth of homeownership, as part of the American Dream, many groups at the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy (such as women and in particular single female-headed households of colour) have few choices but to accept housing loans under terms more adverse than were offered to other (non-minority) borrowers (Dymski 2009). The underlying, and also fatal assumption, of homeownership was that house prices will continue to rise and thus owners
could remortgage to either reduce the interest rates payable on their loans, or release equity from the homes. As such homeownership became an object of leveraged investment (Langley 2008; Schwartz 2008; Marcuse 2009). Our analysis of the gender dimension of indebtedness discusses single female-headed households within a framework of social stratification. There is considerable evidence that household wealth is unequally distributed in the United States (Yamokoski and Keister 2006; Schmidt and Sevak 2006). The deepening of neoliberal politics and intensification of financialization in the American economy over the past decade increased the financial as well as human insecurities experienced by low-income households, affecting in particular many poor women and minority households. The American government’s attempts to redefine its obligations to its citizens under the rubric of fiscal restraint translated into declining state subsidies and government transfers for low-income and non-standard employment groups. This tran