Underwater - by Ryan Dezember (Hardcover)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"Underwater is a fresh perspective on the financial crisis that shows how it is still reverberating more than a decade later, casting doubt on the notion that homeownership is crucial to the American dream and inspiring a massive bet by the country's richest real-estate investors that it's not. In a dispassionate, yet deeply personal story that zips between Wall Street and Main Street-or, to be more precise, Audubon Drive in Alabama-Ryan Dezember shows how decisions in New York and Washington played out on his street in a booming corner of the Sunbelt that was convulsed by the crash. Instead of watching the U.S. housing market collapse from trading floors in Manhattan as in previous accounts, readers will witness the mortgage meltdown from his perch as a newspaper reporter, first in the boom-to-bust South and later in New York, among the financiers who are gobbling up suburban homes and profiting in the aftermath. Through it all, Dezember is an underwater homeowner caught up in the mess"--<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p><b>Winner of the Bruss Real Estate Book Award<br></b><br>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. <p/>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. <p/>A cautionary tale of Wall Street's push to turn homes into assets, <i>Underwater</i> is a powerful, incisive story that chronicles the crash and its aftermath from a fresh perspective--the forgotten, middle-class homeowner.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><p>Well told...what Dezember does have working for him are some wonderfully flamboyant characters and a knack for telling a good story. --<i><b>New York Times</b></i> <p/>Ryan Dezember's study of home buying and selling in America is frightening, enlightening, and infuriating. --<b>Don Noble, Alabama Public Radio<br></b><br>If you think you've heard the housing bust story, you haven't until you read Dezember's account of the single-family home rental industry that sprung up as a result. --<b>Chris Wetterich, <i>Cincinnati Business Courier</i><br></b><br>A unique and incisive portrait of the fallout from the 2008 housing crash that combines investigative journalism with his experiences as an 'underwater' homeowner...This well-informed and wryly humorous account humanizes the story of the financial meltdown without sacrificing big-picture analysis. --<b><i>Publishers Weekly</i></b></p><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>RYAN DEZEMBER is a reporter for <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>, <i> </i>writing about financial markets and investors. He previously wrote about the oil industry from the <i>Journal's</i> Houston bureau. Before that he worked as a reporter for the <i>Mobile</i> <i>Register</i>, reporting on the real-estate boom and bust for coastal Alabama's daily newspaper. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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