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.
