Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/making-sense-of-the-foreclosure-crisis Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript In the latest in a series of reports making sense of the economy, NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman examines the ongoing foreclosure crisis. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. ANTOINETTE COFFI-AHIBO, homeowner: OK. They told me the mortgage going to cost me $4,000 every — every month, that I'm going to pay that only for one year. After a year, I can refinance, so I can get a lower mortgage. PAUL SOLMAN: Antoinette Coffi-Ahibo, a typical victim of the housing crash. Born in the Ivory Coast, now a LensCrafters optician, she lives in a Queens, New York, house she bought new two years ago for $679,000, next to houses valued at far less. ANTOINETTE COFFI-AHIBO: Afterwards, I find out that I have two mortgage. One was 6 percent and the other one was 11 percent. PAUL SOLMAN: And — but you didn't know that at the time? ANTOINETTE COFFI-AHIBO: No, I didn't know that at the time, no. PAUL SOLMAN: But did you read the paperwork? Did you get some… ANTOINETTE COFFI-AHIBO: It was so many paperwork. I don't know, but is was a bunch of paper that we have to go through that says, just sign. Everybody here was like that. Everybody has two mortgage, like me. PAUL SOLMAN: Two subprime mortgages that put her and her fellow immigrant homeowners at risk of foreclosure.Bobby Darkwah is from Ghana. BOBBY DARKWAH, Homeowner: To have a house in America is a dream come true. The time I came here, 20 years ago, my dream was to have American dream. And that's a house, not a car. It's a house. PAUL SOLMAN: It's the story of neighborhoods like this that journalist Alyssa Katz puts into context in "Our Lot," her sweeping new book on housing in America, that this story can only give a hint of.ALYSSA KATZ, author, "Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us": Yes, Jamaica, Queens, is over there by Kennedy Airport. PAUL SOLMAN: Katz met us at the Queens Museum's recent show about the housing crisis — above this New York City panorama from the 1964 World's Fair, each pink symbol showing a city block with three or more foreclosures, blocks clustered in areas like Jamaica. ALYSSA KATZ: It's a bastion of middle-class black homeownership, and a real sign, in a lot of ways, of the success of homeownership in helping families build wealth. PAUL SOLMAN: The significance of Jamaica is that it symbolizes the larger story Katz tells, good intentions run amok, because, 100 years ago, homeownership wasn't all that common, until Republican President Herbert Hoover began promoting it in the great boom of the so-called Roaring '20s.