Distressed Publics: Circumventing the Mortgage from South Africa to Ireland

Nate Coben and Melissa K. Wrapp

Many academics and activists have critiqued the mortgage industry as a central engine of global financialization. Indeed, mortgages have long been espoused as vehicles of liberalization, liquidity, and economic development. And yet in our two very different field sites—South Africa and Ireland—we saw people doing a lot of work to avoid mortgages altogether, driven by a healthy skepticism of what the mortgage could do for them. This chapter emerged from our shared interest in the Janus-faced quality of mortgages in a cross-cultural context. One way of reading the fact that people are not so keen on these mortgage-based political projects would be to see them as the failure of developmentalist and financial modernity–in other words, as the result of a lack of cultural or financial resources with which to take advantage of these financial instruments. We, however, see people quite aware of what they are passing up on and why. Rather than reading failure and lack into these evasions, in our chapter we read mortgage avoidance as creative, nurturing new political imaginaries outside and around the mortgage, often drawing on networks of reciprocity and kin. We invite readers to think through the seemingly atavistic movements that refute modernist policies as examples of emerging “distressed publics”—where the publics are forming in response to the ostensible failure of fiscal and developmental policy style themselves in ways that appear traditionalist, clannish, and familial.

South Africa and Ireland are very different contexts to be observing the relative inventions and innovations that emerge out of people’s avoidance of, or escape from, mortgage relations. The two countries each have very different postcolonial histories.  There is a very meaningful difference between being the poster child for European austerity policies, and a kind of postcolonial laboratory for liberal developmentalist projects from around the globe. Nonetheless, each has been indelibly shaped by an explicit politicization of questions relating to real property. In the case of Irish nationalism, security of tenure and anti-eviction movements were at the heart of the movement for independence from Britain, while in South Africa the history of apartheid and the racialization of housing and real estate were at the forefront of concerns for a new post-apartheid nation. In the chapter, we examine two large-scale public projects, the provision of post-apartheid social housing in South Africa and the fiscal resolution of an unprecedented mortgage market crisis in Ireland.

In Ireland, we describe contemporary lay litigant movements that are refashioning nationalist anti-eviction histories to provide “distressed mortgagors,” homeowners who have defaulted on their mortgages for some time, with a rhetoric and set of dubious schemes to exit their mortgage arrangements while maintaining possession of their home under threat of repossession. Meanwhile, in South Africa, due to a confluence of financial and political interests, homeownership came to be positioned as a vital element of post-apartheid restorative justice. However, despite significant investment in initiatives to extend loans to first-time homebuyers, uptake has been limited, with many preferring to vie for access to state-subsidized housing projects, past and present, instead. We found it compelling to think through the commonalities between our two field sites, not only because the mortgage is such a favored policy instrument, but also because the reach of the mortgage is something of a trace of European imperialism (which provided the legal landscape for its transplantation).

The key commonality we first see in our work is that the private property innovation of the mortgage was indeed shaping new, modern publics; but not necessarily the ones that fiscal policymakers, NGOs, and governments were hoping for and expecting. The publics we saw emerging in the relative failures of mortgage-based strategies to resolve economic problems were compelling in how they played with the trappings of traditionality to assert themselves. Instead of submitting to the rigid hierarchy of formalized debt obligations, our interlocutors preferred more flexible relational dynamics found in interpersonal agreements and alternative networks of reciprocity, indebtedness, and power. Thus, we analyze these resulting patterns of sociality emerging out of mortgage avoidance as “distressed publics.” By “distressed” we mean to gesture not only to the immediate conditions of economic precarity that these would-be (or wouldn’t-be) mortgagors teeter on, but also to a seeming resurgence in clannishness in anti-mortgage responses (that is, distressed in the sense of something new, made old; think distressed denim jeans). We see that projected traditionality in some sense as a displacement of the actually very antiquated heart of the mortgage. At its core, no matter how dressed up in shiny new clothes, the mortgage is a feudal thing, continually rediscovered and re-presented as a highly modern answer for different problems.

Read more in chapter by Nate Coben and Melissa K. Wrapp, “Distressed Publics: Circumventing the Mortgage from South Africa to Ireland,” in Land and the Mortgage: History, Culture, Belonging.