Preview
  • Sunbelt Blues

  • The Failure of American Housing
  • By: Andrew Ross
  • Narrated by: Ramon de Ocampo
  • Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (9 ratings)

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Sunbelt Blues

By: Andrew Ross
Narrated by: Ramon de Ocampo
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Publisher's summary

The author of The Celebration Chronicles - an exposé of Disney’s small town community development - returns to the outskirts of the Magic Kingdom with Sunbelt Blues, an eye-opening investigation of America’s rural and suburban homelessness 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 28 out of 3,140 counties in America. The single worst place 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 15-mile Route 192 corridor in Osceola has become a site of shocking contrasts. At one end, absentee investors snatch up foreclosed properties to turn into extravagant vacation homes for affluent visitors, destroying affordable housing in the process. At the other, underpaid theme park workers, displaced families, disabled and elderly people subsisting on government checks are technically homeless, living crammed into dilapidated, roach-infested motels, or even in tent camps in the woods.

Through visceral, frontline reporting from the motels and encampments dotting Central Florida, renowned sociologist and journalist 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, Ross reveals how ineffective government planning, property market speculation, and poverty wages have combined to create this catastrophe.

Immersive and compassionate, Sunbelt Blues finds in Osceola County a bellwether for the future of homelessness in America.

A Macmillan Audio production from Metropolitan Books.

©2021 Andrew Ross (P)2021 Macmillan Audio
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Excellent study on housing situation

Being in Florida real estate this book was fascinating to me. The explosive growth and rapidly increasing housing values have shut out so many people and this author gives a very informed picture of the current situation

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