Doctoral Dissertation Research: Factors Contributing to the Efficacy of Mortgage-Based Homeownership Initiatives

自战后以来，学者和政策制定者一直认为，拥有住房是打破贫困循环的关键因素。事实上，拥有一套房子会给贫困家庭带来巨大的好处，而抵押贷款是实现这一点的最佳方式，这种想法已经成为世界各地减贫战略的核心假设。然而，美国2007-2008年的金融危机对低收入家庭来说，拥有住房是否真的是一个值得的目标提出了关键质疑，这些家庭在危机中遭受了不成比例的痛苦和损失。该项目对学生进行实证性、科学性的数据收集和分析方法的培训，探索住房所有权在多大程度上有效地打破贫困循环，以及在什么确切条件下，对于建立真正促进社会经济福祉的有效政策至关重要。除了为人类学研究生的培训提供资金外，研究结果还将传播给组织和个人，探索哪些因素促进或阻碍家庭利用住房所有权打破贫困循环的能力。在芝加哥大学斯蒂芬·帕尔米博士的指导下，S·埃斯科瓦尔·冈萨雷斯探索了社会经济和文化因素对抵押贷款购房计划成败的影响。这项研究将在墨西哥西部瓜达拉哈拉大都市区的直辖市Tlajomulco de Zúñiga进行。这是一个特别合适的研究环境，因为自2001年以来，它一直是一项政府计划的地点，该计划在不同的低收入家庭池中大幅扩大基于抵押贷款的住房拥有率，导致了不同程度的基于案例的成功。因此，研究环境将允许对抵押贷款和基于抵押贷款的住房所有权影响不同类型低收入家庭生活的确切方式进行精确的比较研究，同时评估定义人们制造和维护资产能力的关键解释变量。基于战略比较样本，调查人员将构建36个案例研究，包括对比家庭结构、就业概况以及收入和资产历史，从而阐明不同的家庭如何在过程中支持和制约基于抵押贷款的住房拥有。该项目将促进关于新自由主义的人类学讨论，关于价值和道德经济的经济人类学辩论，以及关于债务、社会性和财产之间关系的跨学科研究。

Since the post-war period, scholars and policy makers have understood homeownership to be a key factor in breaking the cycle of poverty. Indeed, the idea that owning a house confers enormous benefits on poor families, and that mortgages are the best way to do this, has become a central assumption in poverty-reduction strategies the world over. And yet, the 2007-2008 financial crisis in the United States crucially questioned whether homeownership was reliably a worthwhile goal for low-income families, who disproportionately suffered and lost in the crisis. This project, which trains a student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, explores the extent to which homeownership is effective in breaking the cycle of poverty, and in what exact terms, is fundamental to the construction of effective policies that truly promote socioeconomic wellbeing. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, findings will be disseminated to organizations and individuals exploring what factors promote or hinder families' ability to harness homeownership to break the cycle of poverty.Inés Escobar Gonzalez, under the supervision of Dr. Stephan Palmié of the University of Chicago, explores what socioeconomic and cultural factors contribute to the success or failure of mortgage-based homeownership initiatives. The research will be conducted in Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, a municipality in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara in western Mexico. This is a particularly apt research setting because, since 2001, it has been the site of a government program that dramatically expanded mortgage-based homeownership rates amongst a diverse pool of lower-income families, resulting in various levels of case-based success. Therefore, the research setting will allow for a precise comparative study into the exact ways mortgages and mortgage-based homeownership are impacting the lives of different kinds of lower-income families, all while assessing the crucial explanatory variables that define people's ability to make and maintain assets. Based on a strategic comparative sample, the investigators will construct 36 case studies that comprise contrasting household structures, employment profiles, and income and asset histories, thus elucidating how different families are processually enabled and constrained by mortgage-based homeownership. The project will contribute to anthropological discussions about neoliberalism, economic anthropological debates about value and moral economies, and cross-disciplinary research on the relationship between debt, sociality, and property.