When a crisis occurs in America, we usually have the decency to perform an accounting. We know how many died when the Titanic sank or when the Twin Towers fell. We know how much property was destroyed in the recent California wildfires. But incredibly, we don’t have a precise totaling of the number of Americans who lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis, following the implosion of the financial system and subsequent Great Recession. The government simply didn’t tally up the damage, which tells you everything about how much the victims mattered to those in charge.

The best estimates, all from private sources, vary. Industry analyst CoreLogic, in a March 2017 report, claimed 7.78 million foreclosures between 2007 and 2016, a figure that doesn’t include short sales or deed-in-lieu foreclosures, transactions that resulted in family dispossessions. The National Association of Realtors does include short sales, and begins from the actual peak of the housing bubble in 2006, finding 9.3 million lost homes from then to 2014. Add in the continued defaults  —  as recently as the first quarter of 2018, 45% of all loans in foreclosure were originated in the peak housing bubble years  —  and it’s reasonable to get to 10 million

That’s somewhere between 20 and 25 million people evicted from a home they purchased, the biggest and most important financial transaction of their lives turned to rubble. They were sold on a dream, a fantasy passed down through the generations about picket fences and a Chevrolet in the driveway. They didn’t know who was lurking on the other side of the mortgage contract: an orgy of predatory lenders desperate to fill big-bank demands for more loans to convert into securities. As borrowers faltered under high-cost mortgages they couldn’t afford, and were pushed into foreclosures instead of loan modifications, they faced the dark side of the American Dream.