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Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing
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30/99
Critics
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Volume
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Rating
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About This Book
An eye-opening investigation of America's rural and suburban housing crisis, told through a searing portrait of precarious living in Disney World's backyard. Today, a minimum-wage earner can afford a one-bedroom apartment in only 145 out of 3,143 counties in America. One of the very worst places in the United States to look for affordable housing is Osceola County, Florida. Once the main approach to Disney World, where vacationers found lodging on their way to the Magic Kingdom, the fifteen-mile Route 192 corridor in Osceola has become a site of shocking contrasts. At one end, global investors snatch up foreclosed properties and park their capital in extravagant vacation homes for affluent visitors, eliminating the county's affordable housing in the process. At the other, underpaid tourist industry workers, displaced families, and disabled and elderly people subsisting on government checks cram themselves into dilapidated, roach-infested motels, or move into tent camps in the woods. Through visceral, frontline reporting from the motels and encampments dotting central Florida, renowned social analyst Andrew Ross exposes the overlooked housing crisis sweeping America's suburbs and rural areas, where residents suffer ongoing trauma, poverty, and nihilism. As millions of renters face down evictions and foreclosures in the midst of the COVID-19 recession, Andrew Ross reveals how ineffective government planning, property market speculation, and poverty wages have combined to create this catastrophe. Urgent and incisive, Sunbelt Blues offers original insight into what is quickly becoming a full-blown national emergency.
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Reviews
"Although sections dealing with the predatory economics of the housing market can be dry, the author's focus on details of place and real peoples' lives makes for poignant, engaging reading, punctuating the conclusion that 'alternatives to the market delivery model for housing are desperately needed.' An important snapshot of the sorry effect of the housing crisis on the environment and society."
"While Ross completed this book largely before the pandemic, he makes it painfully clear that investors are once again circling distressed homeowners who are behind on their mortgages."
"This book will have particular interest for libraries in the Sunbelt, but it's not just about Florida: full-time minimum wage workers can barely afford rent anywhere in the nation."
"dismaying and deeply reported ..."
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