Underwater How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare

Ryan Dezember, Sean Patrick Hopkins

eAudio - 2020

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. 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... more