ARCHITECTURE

additional direct provision of aid to those who fell outside
of its assumed embrace. 42 This move was complemented
by adjustments to housing policy. HOPE VI legislation
(“Homeownership Opportunities for People Everywhere”),
launched by the Clinton administration in 1992,
aimed to reduce concentrated poverty through the public-private
redevelopment of distressed public housing
projects into lower-density, mixed-income communities
[See 1.3.3.4, HH: 1994].
Reinforcing the implications of this policy, new
mechanisms emerged within lending practice for increased
productivity in the expanded, financialized market.
Subprime loans are designed to provide borrowing opportunities
to individuals with low credit ratings who are
unable or have difficulty obtaining prime (conventional)
loans. Because lenders perceive these borrowers as more
likely to default on their loans than borrowers with higher
credit ratings, subprime mortgages typically impose
higher interest rates and steeper fees and penalties than
conventional mortgages. 43 The subprime loan market increased
in value from around $43 billion in 1994 to $385
billion in 2003. 44 In low-income, predominantly minority
communities—the same ones largely marginalized from
CEA’s “shared growth” and, subsequently, cajoled into participating
in a less-and-less regulated market—the share of
home-buying loans that were sub-prime increased from
around 2 percent in 1993 to 13 percent in 2001. 45 There
also, the share of refinanced loans that were sub-prime
was 20 percentage points higher than the share for affluent,
predominantly white neighborhoods in 2001. 46 Black
and Hispanic households were nearly two times as likely
to experience or be at serious risk of foreclosure compared
to white households during the housing crash. 47
Accordingly, for a contemporary audience, the
CEA’s use of the word “recovery” for a period bridging
the “Great Recession” of 2008–2013 deserves a second
look [See HH: 2010]. With the implication being that
productivity, understood in its established technological,
growth-oriented postwar frame, can or should be “recovered,”
one is again reminded of the suburban communities
heralded during the “Age of Shared Growth”—which
are now more widely distributed, diverse in size and demographic
makeup, and yet increasingly divided along
economic lines. 48 The country is seeing a decline in the
proportion of suburbs that can be categorized as middle
class—cleaving from the imaginary undergirding of the
CEA’s narrative. Instead there exists a growing disparity
between affluent and poor suburbs. Between 2000 and
2011, in the suburbs of the largest metropolitan areas, the
number of people living below the poverty line grew by
64 percent. In comparison, the impoverished population
in cities grew by 29 percent. 49 Whereas thirty years
ago, these cities and their suburbs hosted equal shares of
immigrants, by 2010, more than half of the country’s immigrants
were living in suburbs (compared to 33 percent
living in cities). 50
Though it helped get Bill Clinton elected to the
U.S. presidency just before this period began, it turns out
that the central issue was not just, as he famously said, “the
economy, stupid.” 51 With growth, participation, and productivity
also comes marginalization. But this story does not
fit neatly into the narrative given within the CEA report.
In a period that has now been labeled “The Great Acceleration,”
in reference to human-generated climate change,
this suffusion of the sociocultural and environmental
context with economic thinking must be understood as
constitutive of the changing—and accelerating—nature of
inequality as such. 52 Seeing income inequality as both an
egregious and insufficient marker of contemporary conditions
cannot be dismissed as self-contradicting. Gay
rights, seemingly improving at a rate unforeseen by many,
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