Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

Vol. 7, No. 2, June 2010, pp. 176
201

Home is Where the Capital is: The

Culture of Real Estate in an Era of
Control Societies
Joshua S. Hanan

This essay explores the changing nature of home ownership in America over the past
70 years in an attempt to explain how shifting cultural attitudes about this social and
economic structure played a large role in Americas recent housing bubble. By using
Foucaults concept of disciplinary societies and Gilles Deleuzes idea of societies of
control as a framework for explaining this differentiation in attitudes, the essay argues
that in neoliberal capitalism the home no longer functions as a space of social and
economic reproduction but instead as a site of social and economic production.
Keywords: Real Estate Culture; Neoliberalism; Control Societies; United States Housing
Bubble; Communicative Labor
Few dispute the origin of Americas current economic crisis. In the past two years
consensus has emerged that a housing bubble, beginning in 2001 and ending in 2006,
was the principal culprit.1 During this timeframe, Americans witnessed seemingly
exponential increases in home prices. As the Case-Shiller home price index has
demonstrated, key cities in nearly every geographic region saw homes appreciate at
unprecedented rates, leaving many homeowners with sudden wealth and many
renters with corresponding envy.2
More significant than the economic shift in home values, however, was an
accompanying change in how home ownership was conceptualized in America. As
epitomized by home valuation websites such as Zillow.com, home ownership had
become associated with irrational exuberance,3 or what Newsweek columnist Daniel
McGinn termed housing lust.4 While traditionally understood as a potential form
Joshua S. Hanan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas
at Austin. He would like to thank Billy Earnest for his editing of this essay. He would also like to thank Matt
Morris, John McKenzie, Brian Simmons, Joshua Gunn, and Dana Cloud for their constructive comments.
Finally, the author would like to thank Dr. Greg Wise and the two anonymous reviewers at CC/CS for their
patience, feedback, and professionalism. Correspondence to: Joshua Hanan, 1184 Ridgeway Dr, Austin, TX
78702, USA. E-mail: jhanan1982@mail.utexas.edu
ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) # 2010 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/14791421003759166

Home Is Where the Capital Is 177

of investment, during the housing bubble the home went from its primary role as
a roof over ones head to an immaterial site of convergence between personal
identification, the internet, and finance capital. Thus, at the core of the housing
bubble was a new culture of real estate (hereafter referred to as CORE) that in the
words of Time magazine columnist James Poniewozik reconceived home ownership
as somewhere between the humble family hearth of old and the cold numbers in our
bank and broker statements.5
In this essay I argue that the emergence of CORE can be understood by studying the
changing nature of home ownership in the past 70 years and that this evolution
corresponds more generally with a transformation in governance between what
Foucault called disciplinary societies and what Gilles Deleuze has termed societies
of control. Unlike disciplinary societies, which regulate populations through a
transcendent dialectic between individual and mass, control societies allow individuals
and masses to exist immanently as metastable states of a single modulation.6 Thus by
demonstrating how COREs genesis is indebted to the logics of the latter, I intend to
provide an alternative means for comprehending the emergence of the contemporary
real estate bubble and its relation to neoliberal capitalism.
I begin by providing a background for understanding COREs contemporary
emergence by mapping the cultural and economic logics of home ownership within
the shifting terrains of disciplinary societies and societies of control. I will then turn
my attention to a cultural artifact that exemplifies this new way of thinking about
ones home: the internet home valuation website Zillow.com. Following my critical
analysis of this artifact, I will conclude by reflecting on the current status of CORE
and how its ultimate plight encourages us to reconceptualize the social and economic
mechanisms behind the recent US housing bubble and the way we theorize control
societies and neoliberal capitalism more generally.
Disciplinary Societies in an Era of Fordist-Keynesianism
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault describes the emergence of disciplinary
societies, a model for understanding the relational production of subjectivity via an
emphasis on the shifting nature of governance in Europe and America. According to
Foucault, since the late eighteenth century new ways of conceiving punishment
emerged that shifted punitive emphasis from that of the tortured body to that of the
laws interiorization. Foucault labeled this new mode of punishment discipline and
argued that unlike previous penal systems it allowed for a new type of governing that
was diffuse and decentralized. In contrast to previous forms of rule, discipline was
now best understood as a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of
application, [and] targets.7 In other words, at the heart of disciplinary societies was
not the wrath of an all-powerful sovereign (such as Hobbess Leviathan), but a
dispersed ensemble of disciplinary institutions that could regulate subjectivity at the
level of form.
Quintessential examples of such disciplinary institutions included the prison, the
factory, the hospital, and the barracks. By confining the human body both spatially

178 J.S. Hanan

and temporally, these institutions worked relationally to produce environments of

social normalization.8 For this reason, disciplinary institutions perpetuated a logic of
individual and mass, where each site of disciplinary enclosure both disciplines
and maximizes collective energies, and produces individual identities appropriate to
that enclosure.9 The subjects of disciplinary societies, in other words, led doubly
articulated existences, where their brains and bodies were interpellated by the
structures of various disciplinary institutions.10
In conjunction with such institutions, disciplinary societies employed a host of
economic, political and cultural discourses to maintain hegemony. These discourses
functioned ideologically to conceal the interests of those in power and to naturalize
the regimes various institutions and policies. Furthermore, as a system of social
reproduction indebted to capitalism and the expropriation of labor, such discourses
articulated disciplinarity to the evolving logics of capitalist production. In this sense,
while the entire first phase of capitalist accumulation (in Europe and elsewhere) was
conducted under this paradigm of power, disciplinary societies were themselves
influenced by more precise regimes of accumulation, or changes over time in the way
capitalism organized labor for the purpose of extracting surplus-value.11
In the case of modern home ownership, for example, its emergence is indebted to a
particular regime of accumulation that David Harvey calls Fordist-Keynesian.12
As a period of production emerging around 1914 and ending in the early 1970s,
Fordist-Keynesianism maximized the logics of disciplinary societies by employing a
certain set of labor control practices, technological mixes, consumption habits, and
configurations of political-economic power.13 Techniques such as managerialism,
assembly line production, and government interventionism worked in tandem with
discourses such as efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control to create a
climate where labor could be extracted more productively.14 On the flip side, new
inventions such as the automobile and the television gave rise to a more clearly defined
consumer class, enabling capitalist discipline to further saturate the sphere of civil
society.
Out of these developments ultimately emerged a new role for home ownership in
American society. In an era where production and consumption became increasingly
bifurcated, the home emerged as a mediatory site that helped reinforce this dialectical
tension. By functioning as a physical structure and structure of feeling, the home
became an active site of social reproduction, working in tandem with a number of
other spatially and temporally delineated institutions to discipline the population at
large for the purpose of labor expropriation and the maintenance of hierarchy.15 To
demonstrate these claims, I now proceed in Foucauldian fashion by mapping the key
institutions and policies that enabled this model of home ownership to emerge.16
Disciplining the Home
Prior to the passing of the National Housing Act (NHA) in 1934, the state of home
ownership in American society was radically different from what we know today. With
home ownership rates under 40%, a banking system that required down-payments

Home Is Where the Capital Is 179

equal to the loan size as collateral, and a general financial system devastated by the
Great Depression, home ownership was an American Dream out of reach for
Americas majority.17 NHA was instituted as a response to these problems, intended to
provide an institutional overhaul of the nations biggest loan market, namely housing.
Through its establishment of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), a
government agency designed to offer housing insurance to private banks (particularly
those banks which provided loans to low-income families), over the next 10 years
NHA helped to foster a climate comprising lower down-payments and new loan
packages.18
By requiring FHA to offer loan insurance to banks that provided mortgages for
low-income families, NHA marked the first in a series of measures to confer home
loans to American citizens who could not previously afford them. In 1938, for
example, the US government established the Federal National Mortgage Association
(Fannie Mae), a government-owned corporation designed to buy up loans on the
secondary market from banks who issued mortgages to low-income families.
Likewise, near the end of World War II, Congress passed the Servicemans
Readjustment Act of 1944, a bill that enabled the Veterans Administration (VA) to
insure private mortgages provided to veterans and their families. The effectiveness of
these measures is demonstrated by the fact that from 1941 to 1957 home ownership
rates rose from 41% to 57%, the fastest increase in American history.19
Even as institutions such as FHA, Fannie Mae, and VA transformed the mortgage
industry, they simultaneously served to further solidify the boundaries between those
who could own homes and those who were still to be denied this privilege. It is no
surprise, then, that corresponding with the rise of home ownership in American
society was a segment of the population defined by their lack of home ownership. It is
in this sense that we can understand why the emergence of FHA, Fannie Mae, and VA
correspond with their institutional opposite*the United States Housing Authority
(USHA).
Created in 1937 with the passing of the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act, USHA was
another government agency intended to reform housing in the aftermath of the Great
Depression.20 Unlike FHA, Fannie Mae, and VA, however, all of which focused on
insuring and subsidizing home mortgages, USHA encouraged slum clearance and
new public housing construction by loaning money to cities and other local
municipalities. Hence, by funding urban reconstruction all throughout the nation,
USHA became a primary vehicle for implementing Roosevelts outspoken goal of
national rejuvenation and equitable housing for all Americans.21
While USHAs approach was initially effective*improving inner city life and
maintaining an economically diverse pool of citizens to sustain such a climate*by
the 1950s it became increasingly difficult for USHA to uphold its dual objectives.
Increased building costs, easier access to home loans, and policy decisions that
ensured rent for public housing could not exceed a quarter of a citizens income,
all created an environment where public housing appealed more to the poor
and working classes than the middle class.22 Furthermore, with decisions like Shelley
v. Kraemer (1948) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court ruled

180 J.S. Hanan

that the racial segregation of markets and schools could no longer be maintained.
These decisions prompted African-Americans to settle in public housing communities previously occupied only by whites.23 As a consequence, many white
Americans, still imbued with racist ideologies and looking to flee the lifestyle
practices associated with this culture of poverty, began an increased movement
away from public housing and a migration into the suburbs.24
The ghettofication of public housing in this sense contrasts pointedly with the
white flight to Americas suburban landscapes.25 As public housing became
increasingly identified with impoverished inner cities, home ownership became a
privilege linked to Americas bountiful suburbs. From a spatial standpoint, then, we
begin to see a centrifugal division between home ownership and public housing that
can be defined primarily along the axes of race and class. In this light, the motives
behind home ownership and public housing can be viewed less in terms of their
relationship to revenue production (an idea to which I will return later) and more in
terms of their structural capacity to reproduce and maintain certain racial, cultural,
and economic hierarchies. It is from this vantage point that we can understand the
disciplinary function of two quintessential housing operations that emerged during
this era: Chicagos Robert Taylor Housing Project, and Levittown, New York.
The Robert Taylor Housing Project was completed in 1962 under the jurisdiction
of the Chicago Housing Authority and prior to the beginning of its demolition in
1995 was Americas largest public housing project.26 Developed after 1949s Housing
Act, which increased revenue to local municipalities for the purpose of financing
public housing, Robert Taylor and several smaller housing projects comprised
what was known in south-side Chicago as the the State Street Corridor. As a
narrow zone of public housing, more than four miles long, these housing projects
epitomized the decrepit and sterile state of public housing in the 50s and 60s.27
Consisting of sixteen 28-story high-rise buildings and containing over 4,300
apartments, the Robert Taylor project was large enough to be its own city,
faithfully reinforcing a certain style of living that came to be identified with Americas
permanent underclass. That this was as much a racial as an economic arrangement
is evidenced by the fact that over 99% of Robert Taylors population was AfricanAmerican.28
By contrast, Levittown, New York was one of Americas largest suburban
developments at the time.29 Also reaching completion after the 1949 Housing Act,
Levittown benefited from the increased availability of FHA mortgage insurance made
available by the bill. Built on what were previously potato fields on New Yorks Long
Island, developers Levit and Sons transformed the way suburban home ownership
was conceptualized and approached in American society. Through their reliance on
the production and management practices of Fordism and Taylorism respectively,
Levit and Sons built homes in a new way, using prefabricated materials and a
massive assembly line of workers.30
Because of these efficiency principals, the objective of Levittown was not to
produce homes that were luxurious or that expressed individual aesthetics, but to
create instead homogeneous structures of living that could enable the reproduction of

Home Is Where the Capital Is 181

a particular segment of the American populace, specifically the white middle class.31
Hence, like the Robert Taylor housing project, Levittowns sterilizing walls
encouraged the reproduction of a monolithic mass demography by offering homes
that were affordable and appealing to a middle class population. And, like Robert
Taylor, race was an explicit part of this proposition; nearly all of Levittowns original
residents were white.32
Institutionally, financially, spatially, and culturally, then, we can see a clear pattern
emerging in regard to how home ownership functioned in the era of FordistKeynesian disciplinary capitalism. The institutional and financial contrast between
FHA and USHA can be situated in a particular urban/exurban spatial arrangement
that served to reproduce (both culturally and materially) racial and economic
hierarchy. Through their instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application,
[and] targets, these forces worked relationally to discipline the parameters of human
subjectivity and, with it, enabled a particular model of home ownership to emerge.33
While this structuralist framework mimicked, on a diagrammatic level, the various
other Fordist-Keynesian operations in effect at this time, my argument in the
next section will be that since the late 1960s a different model of home ownership
began to emerge that corresponds to a new regime of accumulation known as
neoliberalism.34 This conceptualization of home ownership, while still effective at
maintaining racial and economic hierarchy, is marked by an increased conflation,
or hybridity, between the mass produced institutional logic of disciplinarity and
the individualizing cultural logic of capitalism, thus embodying a new form of
governance that Gilles Deleuze has termed societies of control.35
Control Societies in an Era of Neoliberalism
If Fordist-Keynesianism was the regime of accumulation instantiating home
ownership from the 1930s to the 1970s, neoliberalism must be understood as the
accumulative regime defining home ownership from the 1970s onward. Since this
period, a number of economic problems*ranging from stagflation, to OPEC oil
embargos, to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system*beset American society.
These developments weakened Americas global hegemony and forced it to
implement a more flexible system of economic production that could revitalize
the nation.36 The result was an accumulative regime radically different from that of
Fordist-Keynesianism. Whereas the latter advocated for government interventionism,
strong labor unions, and trade tariffs as a means of stimulating economic growth,
neoliberalism encouraged private property, free markets, and free trade.37
As a rationality that governs the economy by freeing markets from regulation,38
neoliberalisms differences from Fordist-Keynesianism lay primarily in the realm of
labor organization and expropriation. By promoting the lowering of international
trade tariffs, neoliberalism encourages American corporations to seek labor internationally, diluting the value of labor in developed economies. Similarly, by
integrating a number of communication and financial technologies into the circuits
of production, neoliberalism transforms the nature of work both spatially and

182 J.S. Hanan

temporally.39 Finally, through its reliance on discourses such as entrepreneurialism

and freedom, neoliberalism encourages its citizens to imagine labor power as
human capital.40
In all of these respects, then, neoliberalism operates under an alternative system of
capitalist production and thus it is reasonable that coinciding with this shift is a
transformation in how subjects are governed. It is with this insight in mind that in
two works, one an interview with Toni Negri titled Control and Becoming and the
other an essay titled Postscript on Control Societies, that Gilles Deleuze proposes
his theory of control societies.41 While acknowledging resonance with the disciplinary
regime to some extent, Deleuze claims that were definitely moving toward control
societies that are no longer disciplinary.42 Because Deleuze understands capitalism
as an immanent system thats constantly overcoming its own limitations,43 he is
able to demonstrate that a new regime of governance is afoot that relies less on the
transcendent institutional mediation of disciplinarity and more on the universal
exploitative mechanisms of capitalism itself.
Like the neoliberal philosophy that corresponds with its emergence, then, control
societies betoken a more intensive, fluid, and flexible version of the disciplinary
regime. As Deleuze himself puts it, whereas in disciplinary societies you were always
starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to
factory), . . . in control societies you never finish anything*business, training, and
military service being coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of
universal transmutation.44
In other words, in control societies the stratified institutional spaces of discipline
no longer operate independently of one another but instead become so immanent to
subjectivity that they disappear altogether. Thus to frame the situation in what
Foucault in The History of Sexuality described as biopolitics,45 a technique of power
where the principal concern is the constitutive production of populations, only the
society of control is able to adopt the biopolitical context as its exclusive terrain of
reference.46
It is in this latter biopolitical respect that we are able to see most clearly how
control societies challenge the disciplinary regimes distinction between mass and
individual. Whereas in disciplinary societies capital still required mass produced
institutional spaces (e.g., the assembly line, the school, the hospital, etc.) to formally
organize human subjectivity into certain segments so that surplus-value could be
extracted most efficiently, in control societies capital has become so pervasive, both
culturally (e.g., in the form of affective and immaterial labor) and materially (e.g., in
the form of credit and finance), that surplus-value can be extracted from nearly every
individual action. While in disciplinary societies, it could perhaps be said that
subjectivity, located at the interstices of institutional enclosure (in between the spaces
and gaps of power),47 could still be free from capitals logic of capture, in control
societies life and capitalism have coalesced, giving rise to smooth metaphors such as
surfing and perpetual modulation.48 Control societies thus actualize the shift
from what Marx called the formal subsumption of labor to the real subsumption of

Home Is Where the Capital Is 183

labor, marking a point in history where no dimension of life stands outside capitalist
exploitation.49
In respect to home ownership, then, control societies demonstrate how such spaces
no longer function primarily as mediatory sites of social and economic reproduction.
Through a number of other institutional, technological, and financial transformations coinciding with neoliberalism, home ownership has become a site of social and
economic production where the material structure of housing is simultaneously
articulated to the immaterial qualities of individual subjectivity. In this sense the
home has become a space of labor expropriation and biopolitical production for
countless Americans. It is from this vantage point, I will argue later in the essay, that
we can understand why Americas present real estate bubble is so unprecedented in its
social and economic intensity. Before doing so, however, we must map the key
institutions and policies that made possible this neoliberal model of home ownership.
Controlling the Home
The story of home ownership in the era of neoliberalism begins in 1965, when
Lyndon Johnson passed the Department of Housing and Urban Development Act.
Recognizing that housing in America was becoming increasingly characterized by
racial and economic disparities, Johnson sought to establish a new regulatory
framework that could make housing more equitable.50 The result was a new cabinet
agency known as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Under its umbrella, HUD subsumed a number of previously independent government entities such as FHA and USHA. By creating a singular regulatory agency for
both municipal public housing and the insuring of mortgages, HUD became the first
move in a 40-year effort to further liberalize the American Dream of home ownership
and make it more accessible to everyone.51
Three years after the establishment of HUD, another development occurred that
further reinforced these goals. In 1968, Congress decided to privatize its premiere
finance institution, Fannie Mae, changing its legal status from that of a governmentowned corporation to that of a government-sponsored enterprise. The purpose of
this move was to expand the governments role in what was previously a little known
finance sector called the secondary mortgage market. Unlike the regular mortgage
market, which sold loans to qualified individuals, the secondary mortgage market
sold outstanding loans to other investment institutions (such as Fannie Mae).
Through a process called securitization, these investment institutions could pool
together numerous home loans, break them down into smaller parts, and then
repackage these parts into bundled mortgage-backed securities that could be
bought and sold as bonds on the public stock market. Thus to better engage this form
of revenue production, the government had to privatize Fannies profit-generating
function, making its mortgage-backed securities available to the public at large.52
While the privatization of Fannie would lead to increased liquidity in the mortgage
market, the US government also needed an institution that could maintain Fannie
Maes previous objective of buying up home loans geared toward low-income families

184 J.S. Hanan

and veterans. As a consequence, concomitant with the privatization of Fannie Mae

was the establishment of the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie
Mae). While similar to Fannie Mae in its organizational structure, Ginnie Mae
purchased only government-backed loans such as those provided by FHA (now
HUD) and VA. Hence, while both Fannie and Ginnie were placed under the
jurisdiction of HUD, the former was chartered as government-sponsored enterprise
and the latter a government-owned corporation.53
Two years after the establishment of Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae, the US
government created a second government-sponsored enterprise*the Federal Home
Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac)*to buy regular mortgages and convert
them into mortgage-backed securities. The US government now had three financial
institutions participating in the secondary mortgage market, a move that had
significant implications for the nature of home ownership in America. By converting
home loans into mortgage-backed securities, Fannie, Ginnie, and Freddie introduced
a new dimension of risk both in respect to home ownership and to finance more
generally.54
In regard to the former, Fannie, Ginnie, and Freddies freeing of capital made it
easier for lenders to market the home as a form of investment. With lending so readily
available, the home could now more easily be purchased for reasons other than as a
primary residence, such as for a rental property. Thus, even though in the mid-1970s
the national spread of home ownership was thwarted by stagflation and high interest
rates, Fannie, Ginnie, and Freddies freeing of capital would lay at the center of most
real estate booms and busts to follow.55
Financially, Fannie, Ginnie, and Freddies production of mortgage-backed
securities encouraged those on Wall Street to look at the home as a site of economic
production. For such investors, however, it was not the use-value of the home that
was important but its exchange-value.56 Because through securitization home loans
were being pooled together and redistributed in new bundles, the home manifested as
an abstract financial equation rather than a physical structure that people inhabited.57
Home appreciation was thus no longer a concern limited to the home-owning
individual but was now the purview of the stock market investor as well. Wall Street
and Main Street were becoming conflated through the increased financialization of
home ownership.58
The theme of risk as characteristic of home ownership and finance also began to
saturate the sphere of public housing. In 1974, for example, Congress passed the
Housing and Community Development Act, which amended the Wagner-Steagall Act
of 1937. With this law, HUD was able to establish the Section 8 housing program,
providing revenue to private developers who built housing for the nations poor. The
rationale behind this legislation was to spur economic growth by encouraging private
corporations to do their part to solve Americas obvious social and economic
disparities*a precursor to the trickle down economic policy pioneered by
Reagan.59
Nearly a decade after Section 8s establishment, HUD added a new voucher policy.
Whereas prior to this amendment, Section 8 financing was reserved for large-scale

Home Is Where the Capital Is 185

private developers, the voucher program allocated money for individual families who
rented their homes to qualified low-income citizens and veterans. By working with
Section 8 authorities, home-owning Americans could be federally guaranteed a
monthly rental income. Not surprisingly, then, this policy bolstered a prevailing
attitude that the home could be purchased as a vehicle for investment.60
This risk-oriented perspective unifying home ownership, public housing, and
finance ultimately manifested spatially in many of Americas cities. As citizens
increasingly came to view their home as a site of investment, they began to look at
the economic and social consequences of home ownership differently. Whether
influenced by the burgeoning counter-culture and civil rights movements, OPECs oil
embargos, or the more general desire for economic profit, the home became seen less
as a structure of economic and social reproduction and more as a space through
which the dual nature of capitalism and subjectivity could be expressed and
produced.61 Hence, whereas previously American cities were organized by centrifugal
spatial polarizations*with urban inner city life and suburbanization encapsulating
different racial and economic hierarchies*from the late 1970s onward Americas
cities began diversifying as cultural identity began to supplant the mass produced
homogeneity of Fordist-Keynesianism.62
Expressing this spatial migration was the social process of gentrification.
Characterized by the revitalizing of previously decrepit neighborhoods, over the
next few decades gentrification would lead to home appreciation in many American
communities.63 Hence, gentrification fulfils an economic function similar to that of
institutions such as Public Works Administration (PWA) and United States Housing
Authority (USHA), generating capital through the physical reconstruction of space.
However, whereas these earlier entities produced this surplus-value primarily through
the framework of institutionalization, gentrification is fueled largely by the cultural
and economic production of individuals. Gentrification thus epitomizes the
immanent accumulation process characteristic of neoliberal capitalism. By demonstrating how subjects can produce and maintain the flows of capital without
institutional mediation, gentrification is an example of how in the neoliberal era
subjectivity and capital have come to mutually constitute one another.
As a case in point, one can look at San Francisco in the late 60s and early 70s.
While somewhat of a rare phenomenon because of limited space and massive
influx of capital,64 San Francisco nevertheless epitomized the economic process of
gentrification that over the next 30 years would come to characterize popular
American cities all over the nation.65 As Sharon Zukin and Manuel Castells have
written, San Franciscos home price appreciation resulted largely from the cultural
movements taking place in the city during this era.66 In the late 1960s, for example,
San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury district became a Mecca for the counter-culture
movement, attracting people from all over the country and thereby fostering
increased competition for homes.67 Likewise, in the 1970s San Franciscos Castro
district became a hub of sexual liberation, leading gay men and women from various
regions to settle the area and fix up the neighborhood.68 In both of these cases,
cultural production actually precipitated the demand for housing*the opposite of

186 J.S. Hanan

how home ownership functioned in the sterilizing walls of Levittown and Robert
Taylor.
While the gentrification of San Francisco demonstrates the social roots of urban
vitality, it also highlights how such processes maintain the same racial and economic
hierarchies governed by the disciplinary regime.69 As home prices and rents increased
in San Francisco from the 1960s onward, existing residents*usually minorities
and citizens of low socio-economic standing*had to leave or find new living
arrangements (often outside the city limits).70 In some cases, these migratory flows
were initiated by the literal razing of public housing projects (a preeminently
racist operation as the case of the citys Fillmore district illustrates.)71 In other
circumstances, however, class became the line of flight as living costs began to
greatly accelerate in such regions.72 Hence, despite the fact that many of the residents
initially populating Haight-Ashbury and Castro during this era were themselves of
modest economic standing, the increased cultural capital created through gentrification enabled the home to operate as a site for producing new hybrid racial, cultural,
and economic hierarchies.73
This congealing of class and race through the cultural coding of home ownership
demonstrates how social processes such as gentrification have come to replace not
only the accumulative model of Fordist-Keynesianism but also the way this regime
exercised discipline to govern hierarchies. As observed earlier, disciplinary societies
operated through a framework of institutional production that relied on their
articulation to homogenous spatial developments (such Robert-Taylor and Levittown) to maintain racial and economic order. In the case of control societies, by
contrast, we observe racial and economic hierarchy being reproduced through the
valorization of culture, as demonstrated by gentrification which encourages the
immaterial articulation of culture to material structures such as the home. Thus,
although gentrification follows an individuated cultural logic that lacks the mass
produced discipline of institutionalization, it maintains, if not consolidates, the same
racial and economic hierarchies of the disciplinary regime.74
This alternative productive logic, characteristic of gentrification, mirrors on a
diagrammatic level the other hybrid developments that have emerged in respect to
home ownership since 1965. Whether grasped institutionally through the organizational framework of HUD and Section 8, financially through mortgage-backed
securities, or spatially and culturally through gentrification, all of these processes
display an increased overlapping between what in the disciplinary regime were clearly
demarcated identities. Like capitalism and subjectivity itself, home ownership, public
housing, and finance operate in control societies as coexisting metastable states of a
single modulation.75
This biopolitical restructuring is ultimately what fostered the most recent real
estate bubble. However, to truly understand this bubbles economic and social effects
and, more specifically, how it produced a new culture of real estate (CORE), we have
to look at how a few developments in the 1990s characteristic of the new economy
further intensified these neoliberal housing policies and brought to completion the

Home Is Where the Capital Is 187

immanent link between home ownership, subjectivity, and exploitation*for literally

millions of Americans.76
CORE in the Era of the New Economy
From the early 1990s on, capitalism has become increasingly dependent on finance
and other communication technologies to fuel national production.77 Although this
trend dates back to at least the 1960s*when securitization was first pioneered by
Fannie, Freddie, and Ginnie*in the last number of years countless more production
processes have fallen under the purview of these immaterial sectors. So radical have
these changes been that the phrase the new economy has been coined to describe
this recent development in the history of neoliberalism.78 Hence, while the new
economy is consistent with neoliberalism, and therefore should not be viewed as an
alternative mode of production, it emphasizes the immaterial organization that this
accumulative regime naturally gravitates toward.79
In the case of home ownership, the new economy is a useful historical juncture for
mapping the increasingly widespread culture of real estate (CORE) that precipitated
the most recent real estate bubble. Through three recent financial developments
peculiar to this economic regime*sub-prime lending, credit default swaps, and the
unprecedented lowering of federal interest rates*a new perspective on home
ownership emerged that no longer [viewed the home as] just a home.80 This
cultural development was further accelerated by the proliferation of the internet, a
quintessential trait of the new economy and a process I will explore shortly in my case
study of Zillow.com.
In the continual quest to liberalize the American Dream of home ownership, a
number of lending institutions in the 1990s began offering new loan packages geared
toward low-income families. Recognizing that, as a consequence of securitization,
mortgage accountability was becoming increasingly displaced to secondary markets,
lending institutions began offering sub-prime loans to an even wider sphere of
citizens than before.81 Unlike FHA loans, however, sub-prime loans were not insured
by the federal government. Hence, to cope with such risks, lending institutions
compensated by charging higher interest rates even as they asked for little to no
down-payment.
In their easing of lending standards, banks providing sub-prime loans redirected
capital to a segment of the American populace previously excluded from home
ownership. Indeed, many of the citizens allowed access to such capital flows were
subjects who in the Fordist-Keynesian era would have inhabited public housing. Not
surprisingly, then, a disproportionate number of sub-prime loans were issued to
minorities, particularly African-Americans.82 Capital now had a new way of gaining
complacency from its underclass*offering home loans that its citizens could not
realistically pay back.83
While sub-prime loans made mortgages increasingly accessible to Americans,
the introduction of credit default swaps (CDSs) made mortgage-backed
securities more available to investors all around the world. In 1999 Congress passed

188 J.S. Hanan

the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which repealed parts of the Glass-Steagall act of 1933 that
forced investment banking institutions to abide by the same regulatory standards as
commercial banks.84 With the repealing of this act, investment banks on Wall Street
were now able to participate in a number of financial practices that previously were only
granted to commercial banks. One of these activities was the selling of CDSs, financial
instruments that allowed investors to place bets on the growth or decline of various
securities, derivatives, and bonds.
Investment banking institutions such as AIG, for example, could now provide
CDSs on mortgage-backed securities, essentially guaranteeing that if the value of
mortgage-backed securities depreciated AIG would make good on their investments.85 The problem was that as investment banks, these institutions relied heavily
upon the borrowing of money themselves. Hence, if mortgage-backed securities were
to depreciate, investment banks would potentially not have the capital to pay back the
insurance they owed. CDSs thus marked a continued divergence from actual
mortgages, enabling a whole segment of the investing populace to participate in a
market that was originally intended for personal residence.
In addition to sub-prime loans and CDSs, the lowering of federal interest rates also
played a significant role in constituting CORE.86 Shortly after the introduction of
CDSs, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, in an attempt to curb the economic
downturn brought about by the NASDAQ bubble collapse, began a series of interest
rate reductions ending with rates hovering at 1% in June of 2003.87 This policy
measure brought down the rate of a variety of loans, one of them being home equity
lines. As a consequence, Greenspans interest rate reductions further encouraged
Americans to engage in the cultural spectacle of home ownership, leading more
citizens than ever before to view their home as both [a form of] entertainment and
an investment.88
While all of these deregulated financial policies in their own right perpetuated
a zealous real estate culture that fueled the recent bubble, there is another variable
that also must be taken into account. With the widespread presence of the internet in
the late 1990s, the home became technologically mediated from another angle,
enabling an even wider sphere of citizens to participate in a market once intended
for personal residence. With the introduction of an online multiple listing service in
1999, for example, citizens were now able to browse and shop for homes via the web.
Moreover, a few years later, home valuation websites began to emerge encouraging
zealous new investors . . . [to bet] huge sums on the belief that this may be a new
era.89 To better illustrate this phenomenon, I now provide a brief case study of
Zillow.com, which in its immateriality offers us another way of observing the
biopolitical logic of CORE, or the way in which the home has become an active space
of production in the era of neoliberal capitalism.
Zillow.com, Communicative Labor, and Control
Zillow.com is an online real estate company located in Seattle, Washington. It was
founded in February, 2006, by Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, previously the founders

Home Is Where the Capital Is 189

90

of internet giant Expedia.com. Since its inception, Zillow has quickly become one of
the most popular real estate websites in the country. In 2007, for example, the site
received almost four million hits a month and at present sponsors one of the largest
recreational home discussion forums in the country.91 As a Fortune article by Jeffrey
M. OBrien states, if you havent heard of Zillow by now, its probably because you
dont own a home. Or maybe youre just not as prurient and narcissistic as the rest of
us.92
The sites aim is to provide home owners and prospective buyers with a wealth of
information pertaining to real estate nationwide. By logging on, users are able to
access maps, images, graphs, and tax information on homes anywhere in the United
States. Similarly, by participating in the advice forum that Zillow provides, users
are able to identify with other members of CORE and share their interests, values,
and perspectives on real estate. The site even allows users to market their own home
through an option called make me move, demonstrating to the world that we
all have a price when it comes to real estate.93 What Zillow is most famous for,
nevertheless, is its ability to conduct zestimates, up-to-date estimates of home
values nationwide. While in the past home values were limited to comparative market
analyses conducted by realtors in local vicinities, with zestimates home values became
something that can be constantly accessed and viewed by anyone, anywhere.
In its ability to transcend space and time by communicating real estate information
immediately, Zillow makes the distinct occupational practice of real estate increasingly tenuous.94 Since site users can instantaneously determine the value of their
home and that of their neighbors, edit the images and texts that correspond with
their own homes webpage, and even market their home without the need for the
mediating of any real estate agent, Zillow.com turns everyone into ad hoc real estate
agents. These real estate agents, however, simultaneously maintain their other
occupational identities. Hence, through the virtual logics of Zillow.com, the erstwhile
electrician, schoolteacher, or factory worker can live out multiple (even previously
unimagined) identities at the same time.95
This blurring of cultural/occupational identities, made so apparent at Zillow.com,
demonstrates one of the crucial differences between disciplinary societies and societies
of control. In disciplinary societies, citizens are reproduced through a variety of
disciplinary institutions where each space of production gives rise to a distinct
individuated identity peculiar to that institutional location (a factory worker by day, a
consumer by night, a hospital patient on the weekend, and so on). In societies of
control, by contrast, it is precisely these places, these discrete sites of applicability that
tend to lose their definition.96 With the virtuality of websites such as Zillow.com it is
very feasible to be a real estate agent at the same time that one is engaging in a different
occupation just as it is entirely feasible to be a producer when the overall social
environment is articulated through discourses of consumption.97
As a consequence, we can begin to observe how real estate websites such as
Zillow.com enable the circulating of capital flows during peoples leisure time.
Although the About Us section of the website describes it as a recreational venue
that is open to everyone, the constant reference to capital that underscores the various

190 J.S. Hanan

discourses of the site makes participation a cultural occupation par excellence.98 As a

result, visitors can be seen as partaking in both communicative and affective labor.99
Unlike the subjects populating disciplinary societies, which still understood the
boundaries between production and consumption and between work and leisure,
Zillow.com participants experience an increasingly indefinite division between work
time and leisure time.100 Whether uploading images of ones home or envying the
home values of others, the desire to accumulate capital is always implicitly present.
Nowhere is this communicative and affective labor more prevalent than on the
forum section of the website. Located on the main page under the header advice,
the forum is the most interactive part of Zillow and the place to go for any and all
topics related to real estate. Containing nearly 240,000 archived threads under 11
topical categories (such as home buying, home selling, mortgages, etc.), the forum is
an information database that grows daily. Furthermore, with upwards of 40,000
unique visits on some days, the Zillow forum has a large scope, almost as vast as the
discourse it contains.101
By transforming private discourse into public knowledge, the Zillow forum allows
us to see the workings of a new control logic that Mark Andrejevic calls digital
enclosure.102 Central to this idea is an immanent form of exploitation made possible
by virtual spaces such as internet forums. Because on these sites every action or
transaction generates information about itself, internet forums allow surplus-value
to be accumulated through the mere act of communicating.103 In their virtually
mediated states, forum discourses become free commodities for the taking, which can
then capitalized upon in a variety of ways. Hence at the root of digital enclosure is a
coercive paradox between discipline and freedom that cannot be escaped.
At the Zillow forum we can observe the workings of digital enclosure in the
conditional way access is granted to its users. While ostensibly a free space where
users can share any information they like about the real estate market, the ability to
post on the forum is tempered by a complex terms of use agreement. Upon reading
this agreement, users would find that any information provided in the discussion
forums... will not be protected... [because the user has] made an active choice to make
that information public.104 Consistent with the idea of digital enclosure, then, users
are informed that in order to post on the forum they must forfeit the ownership they
have over their own discourse.
Waived of these rights, forum discourse can now be expropriated. For example, any
demographic information produced by these users (tastes, hobbies, interests, etc.) can
now be consumed freely by anyone in the real estate industry who frequents the
site. This information in turn helps professionals to more accurately target these
populations and better refine their overarching marketing practices.105 Furthermore,
this free information also exposes forum users to public solicitation and a more
generally intensive form of marketing than was possible in previous eras of
capitalism. Thus, insofar as most discourses on the Zillow forum have demographic
value, they illustrate how technologies such as the internet, in step with the more
general logic of neoliberalism, are collapsing the boundaries between the home and
the workplace both literally and metaphorically.

Home Is Where the Capital Is 191

While this demographic capitalization is in its own right novel, there is another
way to view the expropriation of discourse that is more affective in nature. In the
wake of the real estate collapse, the Zillow forum has become a preeminent space for
ascertaining information about real estate market conditions. Wanting to optimize
their investment decisions, countless citizens have come to the forum with the hope
of learning more about their decision to buy or sell real estate. As a consequence,
many users, both inside and outside the business of real estate, view Zillow not only a
space that represents home values but also a space that produces them.106 Thus, by
entering a number of complex debates centered on the present housing market,107
many forum users have come to view their discourse as an instrument that can
reflexively manipulate the invisible hand of the marketplace.108
The structure of these debates typically takes place in the form of an agon*with
users either posting comments in support of the cheerleaders or the doomers.
Generally speaking, if a poster advocates for the purchase of real estate under present
market conditions s/he is a cheerleader, whereas if s/he recommends waiting until
the market further depreciates, s/he is a doomer.109 While as a rule of thumb
cheerleaders correspond to home owners and doomers correlate with renters, the
forums diverse composition makes possible a wide range of subject positions.110 For
our purposes, however, what is really exemplary about these debates is not the side
one chooses to identify with, but the way both sides labor affectively in hopes that
they can mediate home prices.111 In other words, whether homeowner or renter, at
the Zillow forum we see a new logic of control where users paradoxically labor at the
same time that they are relaxing.112
Thus, although the Zillow forum is widely perceived as a recreational and free
social venue where citizens can congregate to share information on home ownership, it has simultaneously become an economic battleground where countless
renters, homeowners, and real estate professionals consume, produce, and contest the
very meaning of home ownership. In this sense, like the various other institutional,
financial, and spatial changes analyzed in respect to contemporary home ownership,
the Zillow forum clearly demonstrates the biopolitical nature of life under neoliberal
capitalism. At the forum, no institutional mediation is needed to discipline the
circulation of capital flows. The digital enclosure of this space allows such
disciplining to happen automatically.
This biopolitical control logic is not limited to the forum, however, but as I have
tried to argue, constitutive of the very website itself. From the various tools designed
to make real estate more assessable to the Microsoft Visual Earth mapping software
that represents the home in the form of a home/dollar sign, Zillow transforms
housing from that of private space of interiority to that of a public space of fixation
that can be consumed, viewed, and expropriated by all. In other words, like the
financial deterritorialization of the home that opens the door to investors all around
the globe, Zillows virtual deterritorialization of the home opens the doors of these
investors to the world at large. Viewed in this light, Zillow.com signifies the global
panopticism of home ownership and, as a microcosm of the more general

192 J.S. Hanan

organizational state of control societies and neoliberal capitalism, demonstrates the

conflation of capital and subjectivity under one single roof.
Conclusion: Locating the American Dream of Housing in an era of Neoliberal
Governance
While Zillow.com is only a fragment of the more general apparatus constituting the
contemporary world of real estate,113 when analyzed in conjunction with the various
other institutional, spatial, economic, and technological changes coinciding with
neoliberalism, I have tried to show that a clear transformation has emerged in
respect to how home ownership can be conceptualized. Whereas in the era of FordistKeynesianism, home ownership and public housing functioned primarily as structures
of social and economic reproduction, in neoliberal capitalism, home ownership and
public housing have blurred, sutured together by the deterritorializing logics of
finance and the internet. These changes have enabled home ownership to emerge as a
hybrid space of cultural and economic production (i.e., CORE), and it is this change in
attitude that can partially explain why Americas recent housing bubble was so
unprecedented in its scope and intensity.114
To better understand these exploitative processes, then, it is instructive that we turn
our attention to this housing bubble*an economic disaster that according to many
economists has led to the worst recession since the Great Depression.115 While its full
global impact is as yet unknown, the fallout of the US housing bubble has particularly
devastated CORE. By turning the American Dream of home ownership upside
down, the housing bubble has left countless CORE constituents in a more precarious
state then they were before.116
At the time of this writing, for example, millions of these real estate consumers
are currently in a state of foreclosure, a fate that will force many of these citizens to
relocate and start new lives.117 Worse, the majority of these unlucky souls now also
face the prospect of bad credit and debt, which in neoliberal economies is the
lifeblood of capitalism.118 COREs housing lust and irrational exuberance, it
seems, are now colliding against the brute materiality of unpaid debt and credit.
Whereas in its productive fervor, CORE failed to address the question of what would
happen if interest rates rose or home prices depreciated, with the way the housing
market has gone over the past couple years, avoiding this question is no longer a
viable option.
Yet at the same time that millions of Americans are now facing some of the most
severe financial hardships of their lives, numerous realtors, mortgage brokers, banks,
and title companies have walked away with a fortune.119 Surplus-value, then, did not
end up primarily in the hands of the countless Americans who utilized their house as
a lifeboat, but instead fell into the laps of capitalist institutions, hedge funds, and
multinational corporations*what Simon Johnson calls Americas new financial
oligarchy.120 While this exploitative scenario is not uncommon in capitalist America
(and, unfortunately, is a day-to-day reality), what makes COREs situation unique is
the way such exploitation took place. What is shocking about CORE is that although

Home Is Where the Capital Is 193

a number of capitalists did indeed make out with a kings ransom in wealth, as the
case studies in this essay have indicated to us, no disciplinary institutions were
required to make it happen.
This increasingly autonomous function of control and exploitation at the site of
the American home requires that we reconceptualize the social and economic
mechanisms behind the US housing bubble and how we theorize control societies and
neoliberal capitalism. In regard to the former, it is necessary to recognize that if a new
culture of real estate (CORE), constituted by the entrepreneurial desire for capital, is
one of the principal actors that enabled the recent real estate bubble, then the current
economic models being used by scholars and policy makers alike to understand this
event are inaccurate or, at best, incomplete.121 Without taking into account the
cultural, rhetorical, and ultimately biopolitical dimensions of the real estate bubble,
and the economy more generally, scholarship aimed at illuminating economic
bubbles (and the downturns that coincide with them) may be ineffective.122 Such a
perspective, of course, would not require abandoning an analysis of the material
institutions that suture the United States economy but would instead ask that we
complicate, if not collapse, the degree of mediation between these institutions and
the immaterial forms that coincide with them.123
Insights such as these address the latter concerns, namely advancing our
understanding of control societies and neoliberal capitalism. As this analysis has
demonstrated, exploring CORE through the framework of control societies enables us
to observe how, in the case of home ownership, discipline can operate without the
need for institutionalization. Whether demonstrated through the cultural processes
of gentrification or the digital enclosure of Zillow.com, we have seen that in control
societies subjects reproduce hierarchy by the mere act of living in capitalism. This
immanent exploitative logic is quite different from the transcendent organizational
logic of disciplinarity, which relied on the spatial and temporal separation between
mass and individual to enable the expropriation of labor. Hence, insofar as control
societies are marked by a blurring of this dialectical logic, they call into question the
very idea of governance as a model for relationally producing subjectivity.
The riddle to this crisis of governance can be more fully illuminated by reflecting on
the paradoxical structure of neoliberalism itself.124 While an innovative economic
theory when first proposed by the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, neoliberalism has
always been premised on the ontological principals of homo economis.125 From this
vantage point, markets are composed of rational agents acting purely out of selfinterests. In other words, like the more general dialectical philosophy informing its
transcendent logic, neoliberalism presumes the economy is composed of an aggregate
of actors that each function independently from the whole. Thus, according to its
proponents, neoliberalism is supposed to free this inherent rationality by deferring
the vested interests of governments to the particularities of the marketplace.
This belief in market objectivity is what led numerous economists in the
late 1960s (including the Chicago school) to embrace neoliberalism as an ethico/
political logic.126 Because it deferred subjective interests to the invisible hand of the
marketplace, neoliberalism was able to be touted as a neutral system.127 As the past

194 J.S. Hanan

40 years of neoliberal rule brutally attest, however, the performance of this regime has
been anything but ethical. Whether observed in terms of the recent housing bubble or
the countless other shocks that have come to characterize its reign, neoliberalisms
perpetual tendency to create misery and hierarchy throughout the world undercuts
its rational rhetoric.128 Thus, as Henry Giroux states, rather than a paragon of
economic rationality . . . [neoliberalism] is an ideology that subordinates the art of
democratic politics to the rapacious laws of the market economy.129
Like the crisis of governance that characterizes control societies, then, the danger of
neoliberalism lies in the tension between the theory of neoliberalism and the actual
pragmatics of neoliberalization.130 While ideologically touted as a neutral economic
enterprise that represents the reason of homo economis, neoliberalism performs in a
hybrid manner that is incommensurate with this dialectical way of thinking. As a
globally deregulated economic regime that relies on finance and the internet to
mediate value, neoliberalism materially uproots the very materiality needed to view
the economy as a representation of reason (despite its ideological claims to the
contrary).131 Hence, while neoliberalism valorizes identity it is actually a regime of
irreducible difference. In other words, neoliberalism is biopolitical production and as
a hybrid composition immanently erodes the transcendent logic that it is founded
upon.
This paradox was made concrete in our analysis of Zillow.com. As a home
valuation website, Zillow claims to provide accurate estimates of home values
nationwide. However, as we have observed, instead of reproducing concrete values,
Zillow actually produces home value by virtue of the sites linguistic organization.132
In other words, by immaterially articulating itself to the material structure of the
home, Zillows existence guarantees the home cannot be valued through the
representational framework that it proposes to operate within. Hence, just as Zillow
hides labor expropriation under the identity category of leisure, it hides the
biopolitical production of home values by clinging to the representational trope of
home valuation.
Zillows contradictions are thus emblematic of the more general organizational
structure of neoliberalism and control societies. And like these respective regimes of
accumulation and governance, the websites danger lies less in its reticulate
immaterial nature (a social configuration that actually has radical emancipatory
potential),133 and more in its desire to ensconce this biopower by clinging to the
antiquated disciplinary framework of homo economis. Put differently, the paradox
of neoliberalism and control societies derives from these regimes refusal to
acknowledge their own paradoxes in an era of capitalism where representation can
no longer explain social and economic production.134
Notes
[1] Testimony by Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr. before the Senate Banking Committee on Turmoil
in US Credit Markets: Recent Actions Regarding Government Sponsored Entities, Investment

Home Is Where the Capital Is 195

[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]

[9]
[10]

[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
[18]
[19]
[20]
[21]
[22]
[23]
[24]

[25]

[26]
[27]
[28]

Banks and other Financial Institutions, HP-1153 Cong. (2008) (testimony of Henry
M. Paulson).
Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2005).
Ibid.
Daniel McGinn, Housing Lust: Americas Obsession with our Homes (New York: Currency,
2008).
James Poniewozik, Americas House Party. Time, June 13, 2005. http://www.Time.com/
Time/magazine/article/0,9171,1069097,00.html (accessed 10 March 2009)
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on Control Societies, in Negotiations, ed. Gilles Deleuze and
Martin Jougin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 179.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books,
1995), 215.
This is why Foucault, later in the book, asks the following question: is it surprising that
prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 228.
Nicholas Thoburn, Patterns of Production: Cultural Studies after Hegemony, Theory,
Culture, and Society 24 (2007): 79
94.
On the concept of the double articulation see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1992).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2000), 23.
David Harvey, The Conditions of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991).
Ibid., 124.
George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000).
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).
On Foucaults method see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books).
HUD Historical Background, http://www.hud.gov/offices/adm/about/admguide/history.cfm
(accessed April 2, 2009).
David L. Mason, From Buildings and Loans to Bail-Outs: A History of the American Savings
and Loan Industry, 1831
1995 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Ibid., 146.
Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2008).
Ibid.
Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American
Urbanism (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006).
James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled
Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press).
The concept of the culture of poverty derives from the work of Oscar Lewis who in his book
Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1975)
argues that cultures living in extreme conditions of poverty tend to reinforce such lifestyles
through their daily practices. See also Ruby K. Payne, A Framework for Understanding Poverty
(Highlands, TX: Aha Process, 2005).
White flight refers to the phenomenon of white Americans migrating to the suburbs and has
been studied extensively. See Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier The Suburbanization of
the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Andrea S. Wilson, Getting out of the Projects: An Examination of the Relocation Experiences of
Adolescents Formerly Residing in the Robert Taylor Homes (Boca Raton, FL: Dissertation.com).
Chicago Housing Authority, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/253.html
(accessed April 12, 2009).
Wilson, Getting out of the Projects.

196 J.S. Hanan

[29] Barbra M. Kelly, Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (New
York: State University Press, 1993)
[30] Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society.
[31] Kelly, Expanding the American Dream.
[32] Kelly, Expanding the American Dream.
[33] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 215.
[34] I use to word model in quotes here because, insofar as it operates through a framework of
control, the very representational idea of a model gets thrown into question. See the
conclusion of this essay for a more extensive discussion on this general problematic. See also
See Ronald Walter Greene. Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative
Labor, Philosophy and Rhetoric 37 (2004): 188
206.
[35] For a more detailed discussion on hybridity and its relationship to the movement more
generally referred to as postmodernism, see Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture (London:
Routledge, 2004).
[36] For an extensive discussion on these events and how they precipitated a new regime of
accumulation see Harvey, The Conditions of Postmodernity.
[37] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
[38] Ronald Walter Greene, Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and
Neo-Liberal Governance Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4 (2007): 327
33,
329.
[39] Time/space compression is discussed extensively by Harvey in The Conditions of
Postmodernity, and elaborated in the form of space of flows and timeless time by
Manuel Castells in The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).
[40] Ronald Walter Greene, Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and
Neo-Liberal Governance, 329.
[41] Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on Control Societies and Control and Becoming in
Negotiations ed. Gilles Deleuze and Martin Jougin (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995).
[42] Deleuze, Control and Becoming, 174.
[43] Deleuze, Control and Becoming, 171.
[44] Deleuze, Postscript on Control Societies 179.
[45] Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1, trans Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books,
1990).
[46] Hardt and Negri, Empire, 24.
[47] This realization means that spaces of dissention pointed out by Kendal R. Phillips may no
longer operate in the manner he proposes Spaces of Invention: Dissension, Thought and
Freedom in Foucault, Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 328
344.
[48] Deleuze, Postscript on Control Societies.
[49] Michael Hardt, The Withering of Civil Society, ed. Mike Hill and Warren Montag, Masses,
Classes and the Public Sphere (London: Verso, 2000): 158
78.
[50] HUD Historical Background, http://www.hud.gov/offices/adm/about/admguide/history.cfm
(accessed 2 April 2009).
[51] For a detailed discussion on the ideologies guiding this liberalization process see Richard
Ronald, The Ideology of Home Ownership Homeowner Societies and the Role of Housing (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
[52] Peter J. Wallison, Serving Two Masters, Yet Out of Control Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (New
York: AEI, 2001).
[53] Mason, From Buildings and Loans to Bail-Out.
[54] For a detailed discussion on the relationship between modern home ownership and what in
sociology is referred to as the risk society see Janet Ford, Roger Burrows, and Sarah
Nettleton, Home Ownership in a Risk Society: A Social Analysis of Mortgage Arrears and
Possessions (Bristol: Policy Press, 2001).

Home Is Where the Capital Is 197

[55] Ronald, The Ideology of Home Ownership.
[56] For a further discussion on the difference between use-value and exchange-value see Karl
Marx, Capital, Volume One in The Marx and Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), 294
438.
[57] Castells, The Rise of the Network Society.
[58] On the conflation of Wall Street and main street see Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games:
Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004).
[59] Harvey, A Brief History.
[60] Ronald, The Ideology of Home Ownership.
[61] Hackworth, The Neoliberal City.
[62] Ibid.
[63] My understanding of gentrification is influenced by the work of Sharon Zukin, who argues
that this process can take place through cultural capital. See Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of
Cities (Grand Rapids, MI: Blackwell, 1996).
[64] Manuel Castells, City and Culture: The San Francisco Experience, in The Castells Reader on
Cities and Social Theory, ed. Ida Susser (Grand Rapids, MI: Blackwell, 2002): 130
252.
[65] Hackworth, The Neoliberal City.
[66] See Castells, City and Culture, and Zukin, Cultures of Cities.
[67] Zukin, Cultures of Cities.
[68] Castells, City and Culture.
[69] Castells, City and Culture, 133.
[70] Interestingly, then, the gentrification of San Francisco demonstrates how under the
neoliberal regime the valuation of urban and suburban space has been radically reconfigured.
Whereas the expansive industrial logic of Fordist-Keynesianism typically led citizens to view
suburban space as more valuable, neoliberalisms intensive immaterial logic encourages
culture to become a central means for land valuation. This allows us to observe what Alex
Marshall calls the Californiazation of slums, the process whereby single family suburban
neighborhoods turn into ghettos. As Marshall notes with these areas, we see how being
poor is less about being deprived of decent housing than about the overall social conditions
that often come with it. See Alex Marshall, How Cities Work Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads
Not Taken (New York: University of Texas Press, 2001).
[71] In 1959 the Fillmore district contained nearly 80% of the citys African-American businesses.
However, after a series of public housing demolitions in 1964 and the replacement of such
projects with private, mixed-zoned communities, the African-American population
significantly declined. See Keith Pavlik, San Francisco Communities Fight Racism,
Gentrification, Magazine of the Party for Socialism and Liberation November (2006),
http://socialismandliberation.org/mag/index.php?aid709 (accessed April 2, 2009). On the
perpetual issue of racism in American housing policy see Kai Wright, Mortgage Industry
Bankrupts Black America, The Nation, July 14, 2008, http://www.thenation.com/doc/
20080714/wright (accessed April 2, 2009).
[72] Castells, City and Culture.
[73] Zukin, Cultures of Cities.
[74] On the hierarchical nature of capitalism in the neoliberal era see Stanley Deetz and Maria
Hegbloom, Situating the Political Economy and Cultural Studies Conversation in the
Processes of Living and Working, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4 (2007):
323
6. On the relationship between capitalism and the preservation of racial hierarchy see
Carter A. Wilson, Racism from Slavery to Advanced Capitalism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
1996).
[75] Deleuze, Postscript on Control Societies, 179.
[76] It should be noted at this point that while I am describing a general demographic trend that
has taken place throughout America at large not everyone viewed real estate in these

198 J.S. Hanan

[77]
[78]

[79]
[80]
[81]
[82]
[83]
[84]

[85]
[86]
[87]

[88]
[89]
[90]
[91]

[92]
[93]
[94]

[95]

[96]
[97]

[98]

differential manners. As I will argue later in the conclusion, however, the home can also be
conceptualized metaphorically*as a space of interiority*and thus the hybrid changes
characterizing this structure are emblematic of a more generalized sociological process taking
place under neoliberal capitalism.
For the most extensive conversation on these developments, see Castells, The Rise of the
Network Society.
For a discussion on the new economy see Doug Henwood, After the New Economy: The Binge
and the Hangover That Wont Go Away (New York: New Press, 2005). See also Christian
Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, trans. Gregory
Conti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008).
Castells, The Rise of the Network Society.
Poniewozik, Americas House Party.
Guy Stuart, Discriminating Risk the US Mortgage Lending Industry in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Cornell, 2003).
Wright, Mortgage Industry.
Stuart, Discriminating Risk.
See David Corn, Forclosure Phil, Mother Jones, July/August, http://www.motherjones.com/
politics/2008/05/foreclosure-phil (accessed June 19, 2009) and Daniel Gross, Shattering
Glass-Steagall: Lehmans failure marks the end of an era, Newsweek, September 15, 2008,
http://www.newsweek.com/id/159092 (accessed June 19, 2009).
Eric Etherridge AIG: Rage against the Machine, New York Times, March 3, 2009, http://
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/aig-the-furor/ (accessed June 19, 2009).
Mr Greenspan Spins the Bubble, New York Times, September 18, 2007, http://
www.nyTimes.com/2007/09/18/opinion/18tue2.html (accessed June 19, 2009).
Lynn Walsh Interest Rates on the Rise*Economic Crisis Looms, Socialist Alternative, July
5, 2004, http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article12.php?id235 (accessed June 19,
2009).
Poniewozik, Americas House Party.
Ibid.
Zillow.com, About Us, http://www.zillow.com/corp/About.htm (accessed June 19, 2009).
Jeffrey M. OBrien, Whats Your House Really Worth? Fortune, February 15, 2007,
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/02/19/8400262/index.htm
(accessed June 19, 2009).
OBrien, Whats Your House?
Ibid.
Zillow.com is not the only website that provides up-to-date analyses of home values
anywhere in the country. Nevertheless, as the premiere site for this sort of activity, Zillows
structural logics should be interpreted as representative of a more general organizational
logic characterizing neoliberalism and control societies.
To some extent there is still a need for licensed real estate agents to oversee the actual real
estate transactions. However, this has become a site of controversy over the last number of
years as the role of the real estate agent in American society is becoming perceived as
increasingly less valuable. This can explain why the conventional model of real estate
is changing in many respects. See Lesley Stahl Chipping Away at Realtors Six Percent,
60 Minutes, May 13, 2007, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/11/60minutes/main
2790865.shtml (accessed June 25, 2009).
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 331.
This hybrid logic is not limited to Zillow.com or even the realm of real estate. Other websites
such as eBay.com also turn consumers into producers and disrupt the distinction between
work and leisure.
The following quote from the About us section of the Zillow.com website, demonstrates
this assertion:

Home Is Where the Capital Is 199

Our goal is to bring conversations about homes online and create a lively
exchange of information. For years, people have been talking over backyard
fences, in the grocery store lines, and in coffee shops about homes*whether
theyre for sale or being remodeled or theyre just plain interesting. Were
laying the groundwork for the Zillow community*where homeowners,
buyers, sellers, and real estate professionals become a vital part of the
conversation about homes.

[99]

[100]
[101]
[102]
[103]
[104]
[105]

[106]

[107]

[108]

[109]

[110]

Zillow.com, The Big Idea, http://www.zillow.com/corp/TheBigIdea.htm (accessed June 19,

2009).
See Ronald Walter Greene, Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative
Labor, Orator Communist, Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 85
95; Greene, Rhetorical
Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and Neo-Liberal Governance; and
Melissa Gregg, Learning to (Love) Labour: Production Cultures and the Affective Turn
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6 (2009): 209
14. For a more general
conversation on these concepts in the form of immaterial labor see Maurizio Lazzarato
Immaterial Labor, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politic, ed. Paolo Virno and
Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: Theory out of Bounds).
Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 111.
Zillow.com, Zillow Timeline http://www.zillow.com/corp/Timeline.htm (accessed August
11, 2009).
Mark Andrejevic, ISpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2007).
Ibid., 2.
Zillow.com, Privacy Policy, http://www.zillow.com/corp/Privacy.htm (accessed August 11,
2009).
Andrejevic describes a similar process in his analysis of the Television without Pity forum,
a TV fan site where marketers are able to capitalize on the free demographic information
provided by the sites users. ISpy.
Take, for example, the following quote by site user cheapskate who declares that [I believe]
some of the doomers [posting on here] are investors whose main agenda is to spook every
potential buyer and scare every seller who are [in a] distress[ful]/desperate situation.
Zillow.com Forum Thread, WARNING . . ., http://www.Zillow.com/forum/site/ViewThread.
htm?tid20231 (accessed June 19, 2009).
It is worth noting that the housing market has become such a widespread topic that it
recently became its own forum category on the advice section of Zillow.com. See Housing
Market, http://www.zillow.com/advice/US/housing-market/question-discussion-guide/ (accessed August 16, 2009).
Insofar as users attempt to reflexively influence home prices through their discourse, my
research on Zillow corresponds with the more general theory of reflexivity developing out of
behavioral finance. As thinkers within this discipline posit, economic processes are not
rational decisions as much as they are actions premised upon the perceived public opinion of
others. See Michael Pompian, Behavioral Finance and Wealth Management: Building Optimal
Portfolios that Account for Investor Biases (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006); George Soros, The
Alchemy of Finance (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003); Taylor, Confidence Games.
For a couple sample discussions on doomers and cheerleaders see the following Zillow forum
threads Why Im a Doomer, http://www.zillow.com/advice-thread/Why-I%27m-a-doomer/46875/ (accessed August 16, 2009) and The Great Recession, http://www.zillow.com/
advice-thread/The-Great-Recession/198651/ (accessed August 16, 2009).
Zillow.com Forum Thread, (EX) DOOMERS ARE BUYING! http://www.zillow.com/
advice-thread/EX-DOOMERS-ARE-BUYING/35069/ (accessed August 16, 2009).

200 J.S. Hanan

[111] This is why the loss of capital during the present real estate bubble can not only be measured
in terms of home depreciation but also the wasted affect that people spent in the last number
of years.
[112] This insight corresponds with Ronald Greenes more general concept of money/speech which
signifies the way capitalism and subjectivity have come to mutually constitute one another
under neoliberal capitalism. Greene, Rhetorical Capital.
[113] See, for example, the endless array of real estate television shows such as Flip that House and
Flip this House in addition to countless other websites that focus on home improvement and
valuation such as BobVila.com and Realtor.com.
[114] On the unprecedented nature of the housing bubble see Shawn Tully, Welcome to the
Dead Zone, Fortune, May 5, 2006, http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/03/news/economy/
realestateguide_fortune/ (accessed June 19, 2009) and Robert J. Samuelson, Home is where
the Worry is, Washington Post, October 11, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001284.html (accessed June 19, 2009).
[115] Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (New York: Norton
and Company, 2009).
[116] David Leonhardt, For Many, a Boom that Wasnt, New York Times, April 9, 2008, http://
www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/business/09leonhardt.html (accessed June 19, 2009).
[117] Catherine Rampell, Foreclosures Increased 81% in 2008, New York Times, January 15, 2009,
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/foreclosures-increased-81-in-2008/?scp
6&sqforeclosure%20statistics&stcse (accessed June 19, 2009).
[118] This parasitic process has only been exacerbated by the recent court ruling that bankruptcy
judges are not allowed to cramdown mortgages. See Stephen Labaton, Ailing, Banks Still
Field Strong Lobby at Capitol, New York Times, June 4, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/
2009/06/05/business/economy/05bankrupt.html (accessed June 19, 2009).
[119] Although during the period of 2000 to 2007 corporate profit increased exponentially, the
average American saw their annual income stagnate if not decline. See David Leonhardt,
For Many, a Boom that Wasnt. See also What Went Wrong, The Economist, March 9,
2008, http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id10881318 (accessed
June 19, 2009).
[120] Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup, Atlantic, May 2009, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/
200905/imf-advice (accessed June 24, 2009).
[121] In poststructuralist terms an event is a phenomenon that cannot be represented through any
hermeneutical method of Kantian/Heideggerian mediation. For this reason an event
coincides with the plane of immanence. See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans.
Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Alain Badiou,
Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum Books, 2005).
[122] Deirdre McCloskeys pioneering work on rhetoric and economics is particularly instructive
in this respect. See her text Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
[123] On the topic of the decline of mediation in a postmodern society see Ronald Walter Greene,
The Concept of Global Citizenship in Michael Hardt an Antonio Negris Empire: A
Challenge to Three Ideas of Rhetorical Mediation, in Rhetorical Democracy, ed. Gerard
A. Hauser and Amy Grim (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004). See also Cristina Foust,
Toward Degrees of Mediation: Revisiting the Debate Surrounding Hardt and Negris
Multitude, The Review of Communication (2006): 329
41. Finally see Jack Z. Bratich,
Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies, Communication Theory
15 (2005): 242
65.
[124] This latter argument owes partial credit to one of the two anonymous reviewers who
encourage this line of thought in respect to neoliberalism.
[125] See Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty
(Durham, NC: Duke University, 2006).

Home Is Where the Capital Is 201

[126] Ronaldo Munck, Neoliberalism and Politics, and the Politics of Neoliberalism, in
Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, ed. Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston (New York:
Pluto Press, 2005), 60
69.
[127] Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception.
[128] See Naomi Kline, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador,
2007); and Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, Unjust Deserts: How the Rich are Taking our
Common Inheritance (New York: New Press, 2008).
[129] Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy
(New York: Paradigm, 2004).
[130] David Harvey, A Brief History, 21.
[131] For more on this argument see Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity Emerging Network
Culture (New York: University of Chicago Press) and Confidence Games. See also Castells, The
Rise of the Network Society.
[132] Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotexts, 2004).
[133] On the agentive possibilities of this new biopolitical regime of production see Hardt and
Negri, Multitude, and Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude. See also Castells, The
Power of Identity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).
[134] This realization has important implications for the way Marxist ideology critique is currently
employed in our discipline. See, for example, Phillip Wander, The Third Persona: An
Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory, Communication Studies 35 (1984): 197
216, Dana
Cloud, The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,
Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 141
63, and, more recently, Bryan J. McCann,
Therapeutic and Material BVictim hood: Ideology and the Struggle for Meaning in the
Illinois Death Penalty Controversy, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4 (2007):
382
40. Insofar as conventional ideology critique relies on a logic of representation to
analyze texts, it reifies the same rational ideology employed by neoliberalism. For a more
detailed discussion on these issues and the need for adopting a posthermeneutical model
of analysis in rhetorical studies see Ronald Walter Greene, Another Materialist Rhetoric,
Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21
41, Rhetoric and Capitalism:
Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor, and Orator Communist.

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