We would like to thank Terry Hartig for contributing his editorial vision and skill to this focus issue of Housing, Theory and Society. After hearing a much earlier presentation of this work at the 2009 European Network for Housing Research Conference in Dublin, he invited us to submit an article for open peer commentary. He also reviewed earlier drafts of this work and coordinated the solicitation and preparation of responses to our focus article. We would also like to thank (in alphabetical order) Daniel Hammel, Rosemary Hiscock, Dan Immergluck, Kathe Newman and Susan Smith for their thoughtful consideration of, and responses to, our work. We are grateful for the respondents’ collective insights about the strengths of this work, their useful critiques, their bolstering of our present argument with further contextual evidence, and their identification of needs for future research in a similar vein.

We appreciate this opportunity to reflect on our dialogue in this issue and the deeper social concerns motivating our focus on mortgage foreclosure and health in the US within the broader research program at the intersection of housing and health. Before proceeding, we offer some methodological and theoretical insights and questions intended to frame our remaining comments. Regarding methods, we want to highlight that our research design relied on a process of theoretical sampling of places, careful cooperation with research partners and an advisory board, and intensive development, piloting and revision of research protocols, procedures and overall rigorous deployment of our ecological approach. We were fortunate to have support from prescient financial, community development, philanthropic and regulatory organizations. This enabled us to undertake a project of unusual size and scope just as the US foreclosure crisis unfurled. That crisis, the global economic fallout that followed, the extended submersion of the US housing market, and an equally extended “jobless recovery” form the broader context of this work. This context has strengthened our commitment to linking the everyday with broader forces of political economy, ideology and globalization, and we think that this too is a methodological insight.