Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing

REVIEW

SUNBELT BLUES: THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN HOUSING

by Andrew Ross

Review by Jordan April

JORDAN is a second-year student in the Master of City and Regional Planning and Master of Public Health dual-degree program. They are interested in housing affordability, healthy housing, health equity, and lead poisoning prevention. Jordan received their undergraduate degree in government and international politics from George Mason University. Originally from Upstate New York, they have had prior internships with Legal Services of Central New York, the National Center for Healthy Housing, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Holt, Henry & Company, Inc., 2021, 288 pages

Osceola County, Florida, is ruled by contrasts. On one end of the fifteen-mile stretch of Route 192, there lay thousands of luxury vacation home rentals, often owned by multinational investors and realty firms catering to out-of-state and international tourists. On the other are languishing motels that serve as a last resort of housing for the underpaid workers that the tourism industry requires, and for others priced out of the increasingly expensive housing market.

Sunbelt Blues casts its lens primarily on the latter, on those who live in the bedbug infested motels that line the 192 corridor as it approaches Kissimmee. Long-time author, professor, and activist Andrew Ross centers the lived experiences of the victims of the affordable housing crisis in Central Florida, grounded in interviews and investigative reporting. The causes of Osceola County’s acute housing affordability problem are nebulous, multi-faceted, and extend far beyond its borders. However, Ross highlights one significant cause: the commodification of housing. Statistics are paired with ordeals of those interviewed to support a significant call to action, of the need to “cast off the ruinous habit of seeing housing almost exclusively as real estate… and treat it instead as a basic need and human right” (p. 14).

The first three chapters focus exclusively on the motel residents, including the perspectives of government officials, motel owners, and the residents themselves. While a variety of causes brought these legally unprotected tenants to the motels, trauma, addiction, and poverty are some of the main perpetrators. Most are in economically and legally tenuous positions, in which motels are not formally recognized as long-term housing and long-term residents are not recognized as tenants. County government also plays a role in this dynamic, Ross explains that the sheriff’s department often use motels as “a convenient way of warehousing the poor” (p. 51). The tourism industry does not create an incentive to resolve the affordable housing problem, but rather works to hide the problem.

Each following chapter addresses a different part of the county and its specific housing issues. Chapter four looks at the encampments of unhoused people in the woods along 192, many of whom were driven there due to drug addiction, mental illness, a felony conviction, terminal illness, or poverty. The fifth chapter delves into a source of housing instability: Disney World. The motels along 192, meant to serve Disney’s tourists, instead house many Disney employees. Here, Ross highlights the dark underbelly of Disney’s manufactured happiness, in which most of the “cast members” tasked with making it the “happiest place on Earth” are not paid enough to survive. Chapter six focused on Celebration, Florida, a New Urbanist town constructed by Disney, which once promised happiness and utopian ideals of community. Following the sale of the town center to the private equity firm Lexin Capital, these ideals were abandoned in favor of profits for investors, high housing costs, and deferred maintenance. Similar goals of profit are focused on in chapter seven, where the thousands of vacation home rentals stand vacant during the off-season in a county with desperate needs for affordable housing. Lastly, chapter eight looks toward the future of Central Florida in the face of climate change.

The region is a likey location for future climate refugees from the state’s coastal cities, which would

make affordable housing even rarer in what may become an “ecoapartheid” (p. 192).

A significant strength of Sunbelt Blues is the respectful treatment and humanizing reporting of those on the margins of society in Osceola County. Where it may be easy to cast judgment on those living in the encampments in the woods, or the drug dealers operating up and down the 192 strip, Ross avoids falling into this trap. The blend of qualitative and quantitative information, derived from sources such as interviews, government documents, and housing reports, casts a harrowing and compelling picture of the realities of the housing crisis. Abstract statistics, such as housing cost burdens, are grounded in the lived experiences of interviewees, to provide a more comprehensive view of what the affordable housing crisis means for us and our communities. Ross’s research was made even more prudent and relevant through its consideration of how the COVID-19 pandemic deepens inequality, makes even more people in Central Florida vulnerable to eviction and instability, and how private equity firms have taken further advantage of this new housing crisis.

Surprisingly, covering nearly every facet of housing in Osceola County in depth is an impossible task for one book to do. The sheer breadth of housing conditions discussed in the chapters ultimately resulted in attention being taken away from Ross’s initial population of focus: those residing in the motels. Including more elements of everyday life for week-to-week motel residents would have further supported Ross’s thesis. Another significant argument that could have been further explored is housing as a human right, and how housing also impacts one’s health. Both of these arguments could have been bolstered by a greater focus on the impacts motel life have on resident’s physical and mental well-being, as well as particular hazards imposed by the environment, whether it be bed bugs, mold, or water quality. The poor condition of the motels was heavily emphasized, but not necessarily the health consequences experienced by its residents as a result. This link is an important one to make, and to continue making, as we advance the fight for housing justice.

Sunbelt Blues was an ambitious undertaking with an expansive research population and geography. Ross concludes by re-emphasizing the need to remove the question of profit from housing, to finally “achieve the goal of homes for all”, and “de-financialize housing and pivot away from the failed market model” (p. 212). The language and depth of its research allows for this book to serve as a strong introduction to the housing crisis for those unfamiliar, a qualitative resource for practitioners and policymakers, and as a call to action for everyone. This book is a powerful step in helping reframe the rhetoric around housing in the United States, and achieve a paradigm shift where housing is a human right.