Owned: A Tale of Two Americas

Schedule
“Owned” is a fever-dream vision into the dark history behind the U.S. housing economy. Tracking its overtly racist beginnings to its unbridled commoditization, the documentary exposes a foundational story few Americans understand as their own. In 2008, the U.S. housing market became the epicenter of an unprecedented global economic collapse. In the years since, protests in cities like St. Louis have highlighted the stark racial disparities that define many American cities, and the crash of suburbia and urban unrest are not unrelated — they are two sides of the same coin, two divergent paths set in motion by the United States’ housing policy after World War II. The prevailing narrative is that the migration from American cities that began in the 1950s, often referred to as “white flight,” was caused by the degradation of city centers and the growth of suburbia. But this was neither a matter of preference nor a “natural” self-segregation: Government policies directly subsidized white America, while denying opportunities to black people and other minorities. “Owned” offers a surprisingly entertaining examination of that “tale of two Americas.”
Directed by
Country
U.S.Film Category
Human Rights Spotlight Leon & Mary Strauss Documentary Spotlight Mean Streets: Viewing the Divided City Through the Lens of Film and Television Race in America: The Black ExperienceSubject
Human RightsSponsored by
Pitzman’s Surveying Group, Inc., T. Christopher & Katrina Peoples