This paper symposium explores the relationship between debt and city-building. Lending at a variety of scales creates opportunities for growth and decline, for expansion and exploitation, for prosperity and plunder. At the level of the municipality, governments take on bond debt to fund infrastructural improvements, finance pensions, or deliver services. Cities like Detroit, MI and St. Louis, MO depend on the accumulation of bond debt to distribute public goods to inhabitants and establish attractive physical environments for private investment. The prospect of improvement and revitalization conceals crisis and enables ballooning debts that thwart the functioning of public institutions or prompt the wrath of rating agencies employing creditworthiness to govern a city’s fate. Within real estate markets, developers structure financing arrangements that draw from a roster of private lenders and public subsidies. Individuals dreaming of owner-occupancy navigate a crowded lending landscape and interact with mortgage institutions specializing in transaction speed over tenancy security. Targeted predatory arrangements, deregulation, speculation, and market “downturns” threaten individual fortunes and a broader American economy dependent on the sustained health of the housing market. Finally, persons and families without access to conventional banking institutions rely on Alternative Financial Services (the fringe economy) to handle both ordinary and emergency needs. These marginalized borrowers seek out quick cash or rent-to-own products with escalating interest rates culminating in surrendered assets and wrecked credit scores.

At all scales, the racial capitalist underpinnings of the American financial system unevenly distribute risk and precarity in ways that reinforce subjugation and hierarchies. Municipalities, prospective homeowners, and fringe finance borrowers inhabit a neoliberalized financial environment that depends on frictionless access to capital and draconian penalties for delinquency. But lives and futures become uncertain when lending institutions securitize debt, call in loans, unevenly sanction borrowers, or change lending terms. Each day, government units declare bankruptcy, families surrender their homes, and individuals fight off aggressive collections agencies. Where debt is concerned, inclusion is not synonymous with progress.