Housing Crash Laid Bare a Divided America: Strong Towns Featured in National PBS Film Release

Mid-century housing policy in America simultaneously created home equity wealth in the suburbs and exacerbated urban poverty.

These stark economic disparities were exposed and amplified by the 2008 real estate crash. They fester to this day, as we see in Owned: A Tale of Two Americas, a film airing across the country on PBS next week. It links recent protests in urban centers and the crash of suburbia, events which have more in common than most might suspect. 

Owned has been available in limited distribution since 2018, but its national release will undoubtedly inspire a larger conversation. It plays at different times during the week depending on your local PBS affiliate schedule and it can also be watched on demand. 

The film setup and hypothesis covers acres of hallowed Strong Towns ground. The week following its release, there will be an “Owned” Zoom discussion on February 17, moderated by Strong Towns Communications Associate Lauren Fisher. Featured speakers will be Senior Editor Daniel Herriges and President and Founder Charles Marohn, the latter of whom is interviewed throughout the documentary. 

Marohn focuses on how federal housing policy in America dramatically shaped the way our cities and towns are built, and enabled a path to home ownership for some people (particularly well off and predominantly white people) and excluded others (particularly poor people and people of color) from the “American Dream.”

“The crash of suburbia and urban unrest are not unrelated—they are two sides of the same coin, two divergent paths set in motion by the United States’ post-war housing policy.”

— Owned: A Tale of Two Americas

In addition to Marohn, Owned employs a mosaic of speakers to tell its story, from a retired police officer, to real-estate investors, to black neighborhood activists in Baltimore. Policy analysts take their best shots at deconstructing the financial house of cards built on flawed mortgage instruments introduced 25 years ago. Those bad bets exacerbated the commodification of housing and took down the global economy. 

The 2008 crash is autopsied thoroughly in Owned, but the film does some of its best work with humor, including an exchange quoted from the 1970s TV sitcom hit The Jeffersons. “If we can’t pay cash, we do without,” Louise "Weezy" Mills Jefferson tells a loan officer who has asked for her non-existent credit references. “Shhh….What are you saying?” he cautions, “That could ruin the entire American economy. I mean where would this country be if we didn’t all owe more than we can pay back.”

In addition to the “Owned” Zoom discussion, Strong Towns invites readers who want to explore this topic further to find more resources on the Action Lab page.

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