“Homes are so important to our lives,” Bahrani tells TIME. “ They’re where our memories are, where our families are, where we lay our heads down at night.” He wanted to understand how the family that might have been your neighbors ends up living in a motel. Bahrani wasn’t interested in portraying bankers in suits in closed-door boardroom meetings. His aim, he says, was “to take the large ideological ideas—be they class, economics, wealth inequality—and put them into real human beings on the ground.”

For his setting, Bahrani chose Orlando, one of the cities at the epicenter of the subprime mortgage crisis. He immersed himself in all aspects of the housing market, talking to fraud attorneys, real estate brokers and wealthy developers. He saw families get evicted, becoming trespassers in what were once their homes. He attended “rocket dockets,” so called “because in 60 seconds, they decide your fate, and it’s usually not good.” Between the scams, the corruption and the ubiquity of guns, he was blown away by what he found.