I remember when I bought my first home, and how that made me feel […] It's an overused phrase, but it's part of the American Dream. It's a wonderful feeling […] I don't have any study out there I could point to, but I wonder if the homeownership rate was higher in the Middle East if you'd have so much fighting and bickering. I'd love to see a study that shows what the percentage of suicide bombers who own their homes is. Because it's something you can point to and say 'that's where I live, and I own it'. -

- Robert Couch, former general counsel of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2008

Perhaps the only instance of homeownership being posed as a solution to the Middle East crisis, this staggeringly presumptuous comment was recorded by Damon Rich for his two-channel video Mortgage Stakeholders (2008). Couch was one of several people Rich interviewed for the video, in which academics, mortgage brokers and housing advocates explain the current economic downturn, each coming from a particular angle - some, like scholar David Harvey, theorising from a Marxist point of view, with others subscribing to the benefits of the free market. Rich filmed each interview separately, but juxtaposes the speakers on screen, so that while one person is talking another is shown patiently waiting for his or her turn to speak. The effect is one of even-handedness: if there is blame being cast, it is spread too widely to have a specific target.

Mortgage Stakeholders was part of 'Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center', Rich's exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art in the summer of 2009. With