num_pages: 288
description: An eye-opening investigation of Americas 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 3143 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 countys 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 Americas 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.
language: English
title: Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing
publisher: Metropolitan Books