Driven to Debt: Social Reproduction and (Auto)Mobility in Los Angeles

Abstract

Since the financial crisis of 2008, subprime lending in the United States has flourished in auto loan markets. This article charts, for the first time, some of the contours of this underresearched part of the subprime landscape. In so doing, it makes two contributions. First, it widens and resituates debates about subprime lending by building on a suite of feminist political economic scholarship to argue that the sites, practices, and agents of social reproduction provide an essential—and largely neglected—perspective on the endurance and deepening of subprime markets. Second, the article leverages the intrinsically geographical, place-bound nature of social reproduction to provide a more holistic treatment of the financialization of everyday life. The article uses (auto)mobility as a novel vantage point from which to connect hitherto disparate social science literatures on financialization, transportation planning, welfare, and urban form. Drawing on secondary data and qualitative fieldwork in Los Angeles, the research explores the proliferation of subprime auto lending and the gendered, raced, and classed inequalities in mobility that mediate everyday life—the daily commute, the school run, the grocery shopping trip—and the demand for subprime debt.