The provision of social goods in the United States has been marked by exclusion and shaped by the contestation of the excluded. Even as beneficiaries of social policies had trouble recognizing their links to government, members of marginalized groups recognized those links and attempted to reforge them.

This observation challenges a prevalent view in the welfare state literature that the US government's tendency to distribute benefits to citizens indirectly helps to promulgate a quiet politics characterized by low citizen awareness of the government's role in their lives. It does not refute the abundant evidence suggesting that citizen beneficiaries often do not recognize the role of the government in their lives; there is little doubt that such citizens have the luxury of viewing the things they enjoy, such as homeownership, retirement security, or health care, as the result of “a freely functioning market system at work.” But it does suggest that, for others who are less fortunate, the activist state is clearly evident, and often not for the better. This book refocuses scholarly attention onto those groups that have been excluded from access and the insider-outsider dynamics created when the state attempts to channel social benefits to people indirectly, through the use of market incentives.

Across multiple cases, this book documents and describes how outsider groups have come to recognize the role of the government in promoting their constituents’ exclusion from access to homeownership. Boundary groups have transformed what otherwise might have been viewed as individual market problems into collective political ones, thereby open to collective political contestation. They have also mobilized to change the government's role, calling for new laws and specific revisions to existing regulations, as well as pressing the government to use its existing authority to impel private actors to change their behavior.

For a policy area in which institutions are supposed to depoliticize issues of access and distribution, the public–private welfare state has proved a surprisingly prolific source for the tools and materials, both institutional and ideational, by which groups have advanced their constituents’ positions. In particular, as the boundary groups in this book show, public–private policies create both new financial opportunities and new risks for businesses that can be utilized politically.