Sunbelt Blues
The Failure of American Housing
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
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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In this dismaying and deeply reported follow-up to The Celebration Chronicles, Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, returns to Florida's Osceola County and discovers a region beset by "breakneck growth, hands-off regulation, depressed wages, and real estate speculation." Noting that Osceola County has "the least amount of affordable low-income housing per capita" in the U.S., Ross explains how the 2008 mortgage crisis led to commercial and private properties across the Sunbelt region falling into the hands of private equity firms that have jacked-up rents and housing prices. Though Disney World attracts some 75 million annual visitors to central Florida, the region's median wage is lower than any other tourist destination in the U.S., according to Ross. Profiles of service industry workers, Disney employees laid off by the Covid-19 pandemic, immigrants, hustlers, and others who live in seedy motels and homeless encampments along the Route 192 corridor just south of Disney World put a human face on the economic, social, and political forces Ross explores, and he draws on the European model of "social housing" to offer reasonable solutions to the problem. The result is a vital portrait of the dark side of the Sunshine State. Photos.
