Sunbelt Blues

May 1, 2021

Forget Manhattan, the least likely place to find affordable housing in America is Osceola County, FL, where Route 192 once served to sweep people toward the sparkly magic of Disney World. Now, absentee investors have grabbed foreclosed properties along that route to create lavish vacation homes for the rich, while the less fortunate--including meagerly paid Disney theme park workers--crowd into crappy motels and even tents by the roadside. NYU professor Ross uses Osceola County to examine the extraordinary housing crisis washing over America. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

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August 23, 2021
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.

September 15, 2021
Ross, NYU Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, casts a critical eye across the housing dystopia that is the 4,000-square-mile sprawl comprising the Sanford-Orlando-Kissimmee region of central Florida, cited in 2019 by the National Low Income Housing Coalition as the nation's worst for affordable housing. As he interacts with those living in tents in the vast woods just off the Highway 192 corridor cutting through the region, and sets up domicile in one of the many bug-infested, crime-ridden motels along 192 that essentially serve as homeless shelters, Ross discusses the major players who've helped create the mess: an all-powerful Disney corporation heedless of the damage it wreaks on a fragile ecosystem and a vulnerable workforce, a Florida medical community that's actively promoted the explosion of opioid use there, a state apparatus that relies on a coldly bottom-line real-estate industry to create low-income housing, and Wall Street investors wringing every last dollar from properties there. Ross makes it clear that the challenges of affordable housing extend beyond central Florida to the far reaches of the nation.

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October 1, 2021
Unsettling look at how housing in America amplifies inequality downward, conveying privilege to corporate landlords and misery to the working poor. Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, returns to the geography of an earlier book about Disney's planned town Celebration, in central Florida. As Celebration aged into unanticipated crises, the housing in the region has become ever more problematic. "Variants of this affliction had spread all across working-class Osceola County," he writes, "soon to be pinpointed as the place with the least amount of affordable low-income housing per capita in the entire United States." The author notes how many workers in the tourism industry are hard-pressed to find affordable housing or are already homeless, living in dilapidated motels or forest encampments. He first examines the long shadow of the 2008 housing bubble, pointing out that while homeowners were not bailed out, private equity firms snapped up numerous foreclosures, leading to increased rents and mismanagement. Even Disney sold Celebration's downtown to a venture capital firm with "no record of managing town centers nor any vested interest in maintaining the high maintenance standards set by the brand-conscious developer." Ross emphasizes the human cost, chronicling his interactions with countless individuals barely holding on to shelter. The author contrasts the working-class desperation of the motel district with the growth of posh short-term rental homes for the affluent. "The motel owners are an easy target," he writes, "but it would be a mistake to think that the growth of vacation homes is disconnected from the housing distress further along the corridor" 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.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 1, 2021

Is housing a commodity to be leveraged for economic gain, or a basic human right? Sociologist Ross argues that it's entrenched as the former by the market and policy, to the detriment of millions of middle- and lower-income Americans. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and informed by his 1999 book The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town, Ross studies the persistent shortage of affordable housing from the vantage point of its geographic exemplar: central Florida, which he says is among the most unaffordable markets in the United States and is the home of thousands low-wage service workers who struggle to make rent. He visits tent dwellers along Route 192, explores how moteliers have become ersatz landlords, documents the uphill battles of scrappy activist residents, notes how corporate America creates the conditions of poverty, and builds a case indicting the intertwined, devastating impacts--worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic--of climate change, institutional racial inequity, unlivable wages, investor-owned real estate, market-oriented lawmakers, and overdevelopment. VERDICT 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. Ross calls to end market-driven housing and empower residents to make reform; for dwellers and policy-makers, reading this book may be a first step toward that empowerment.--Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.