Underwater
How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Bruss Real Estate Book Award
His assignment was to write about a real-estate frenzy lighting up the Redneck Riviera. So Ryan Dezember settled in and bought a home nearby himself. Then the market crashed, and he became one of the millions of Americans who suddenly owed more on their homes than they were worth. A flood of foreclosures made it impossible to sell. It didn't help that his quaint neighborhood fell into disrepair and drug-induced despair. He had no choice but to become a reluctant and wildly unprofitable landlord to move on. Meanwhile, his reporting showed how the speculative mania that caused the crash opened the U.S. housing market to a much larger breed of investors.
In this deeply personal story, Dezember shows how decisions on Wall Street and in Washington played out on his street in a corner of the Sunbelt that was convulsed by the foreclosure crisis. Readers will witness the housing market collapse from Dezember’s perch as a newspaper reporter. First he’s in the boom-to-bust South where a hot-air balloonist named Bob Shallow becomes one of the world’s top selling real-estate agents arranging condo flips, developers flop in spectacular fashion and the law catches up with a beach-town mayor on the take. Later he’s in New York, among financiers like Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman who are building rental empires out of foreclosures, staking claim to the bastion of middle-class wealth: the single-family home. Through it all, Dezember is an underwater homeowner caught up in the mess.
A cautionary tale of Wall Street's push to turn homes into assets, Underwater is a powerful, incisive story that chronicles the crash and its aftermath from a fresh perspective—the forgotten, middle-class homeowner.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wall Street Journal reporter Dezember debuts with a unique and incisive portrait of the fallout from the 2008 housing crash that combines investigative journalism with his experiences as an "underwater" homeowner. In 2005, Dezember and his wife bought a "sunny cottage" in Foley, Ala., for $137,500. Twelve years later, after divorcing, leaving the Mobile Register to take a job with the Journal, and moving to New York City, Dezember owed more on the home than it was worth and was forced to rent it out. "Looking back," he writes, "I found it bemusing that I was ensnared despite being a newspaper reporter who had made a career writing about the frenzied and doomed real estate market along Alabama's beaches." Dezember faults the "mortgage meltdown" partly on Wall Street greed and government deregulation, but also blames buyers with good credit scores who took out multiple mortgages in order to speculate on real estate. Fingers are also pointed at an Alabama beach town realtor who sold "$28 million worth of nonexistent vacation properties in the time it takes to do a load of laundry," and rental companies that "gobbl up houses" at foreclosure auctions. By and large, though, Dezember remains focused on the effects of the crash on common, middle-class homeowners like himself. This well-informed and wryly humorous account humanizes the story of the financial meltdown without sacrificing big-picture analysis.
