At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State

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The political scientist Chloe N. Thurston investigates federal policy obstacles to homeownership that African Americans, women, and low-income people faced, as well as remedies that these excluded groups pursued. In three tightly defined cases that span the 1930s to the 1970s, she untangles public-private welfare state policies that simultaneously encouraged ownership for privileged groups and erected barriers for marginalized groups. Thurston makes significant contributions to policy and social movement scholarship by thinking systematically about the collective action of organizations that represented people cut off from benefits that fostered ownership. Countering the proposition that complexities of the delegated or submerged state made public action opaque and dampened reform efforts, the author urges scholars to probe how this public-private arrangement shaped the work of “boundary groups.” Civil rights organizations, feminists, and antipoverty activists engaged first in a “politics of discovery,” dislodging claims that the logic of the market alone justified exclusion. By revealing how public policies reinforced pervasive patterns of discrimination, these advocates demanded that the government play a role in making access to homeownership more equitable.