Doctoral Dissertation Research: Changing Attitudes toward Home Ownership, Risk, and Resilience Following the Housing Market Collapse

美国梦的基石是拥有住房，而普通美国人实现这一梦想的能力近年来受到了严重挑战，尤其是在住房危机之后。除了购买永久性住房，美国人选择的替代方案之一是制造（或移动）住房。这些住房在美国住房市场中占很大比例，是至少2000万美国人的主要居住地。在租房者和房主之间，移动房屋所有者几十年来一直受到法律、金融和社会的严重排斥。在围绕移动房屋及其所有者进行的研究中，该项目询问除了金融不稳定和/或特定结构的材料退化之外，还有哪些其他因素可以解释房地产市场崩溃后美国住房复杂性的变化。Allison formack，在科罗拉多大学博尔德分校Carla Jones博士的指导下，探索了美国各地移动住宅社区（mhc）的居民如何应对“不稳定”，一种以风险、脆弱性、物质和象征性退化为特征的不确定状态。该项目将使用一系列人种学方法，包括参与者观察、正式和非正式访谈、档案研究和其他方法，对内布拉斯加州林肯的三个关键地点进行摄影分析：1)计划重建的MHCs；2)经营这些社区的管理机构；3)负责再开发工作的政府部门。这种多层次的方法将产生必要的定量和定性数据，以了解在社区关闭和重建过程中如何产生和传播有关MHCs的知识。该项目将促进人类学、社会法学和社会科学关于不稳定性、弹性、家庭的象征性和物质概念以及风险话语和微积分的辩论。除了培养研究生，这项研究将有助于经济危机后关于经济适用房的公共政策辩论。

A cornerstone of the American Dream has been home ownership, and the capacity for ordinary Americans to achieve that dream has been seriously challenged in recent years, particularly following the housing crisis. Among the alternatives to permanent home purchases that Americans have opted to pursue is the manufactured (or mobile) home. These make up a significant proportion of the U.S. housing market and are the primary residence for at least 20 million Americans. Categorized somewhere between renters and homeowners, mobile home owners have been subject to intense legal, financial, and social marginalization for decades. In situating this research around mobile homes and their owners, this project ask what other factors, apart from financial precarity and/or the material degradation of particular structures, can explain the changing complexities of housing in the United States following the housing market collapse.Allison Formanack, under the supervision of Dr. Carla Jones of the University of Colorado at Boulder explores how residents of mobile home communities (MHCs) across the United States respond to "precarity", a state of uncertainty characterized by risk, vulnerability, and material and symbolic degradation. This project will use an array of ethnographic methodologies, including participant-observation, formal and informal interviews, archival research, and other methods photographic analysis across three key sites in Lincoln, Nebraska: 1) MHCs scheduled for redevelopment; 2) the management agencies operating these communities; and 3) the government offices handling redevelopment efforts. This multi-leveled approach will generate the quantitative and qualitative data necessary to understand how knowledge about MHCs is generated and circulated within the process of community closure and redevelopment. The project will contribute to anthropological, sociolegal, and social scientific debates about precarity, resilience, symbolic and material conceptions of home, and risk discourse and calculus. In addition to training a graduate student, this research will contribute to public policy debates about affordable housing following economic crisis.