Housing, Neoliberalism, and a Crisis in Florida

Book Review - 'Sunbelt Blues', by Andrew Ross

There’s a legion of famous American roads that crisscross their way into the national psyche. First, there’s the famous Route 66, the ‘Mother Road’ that begins in Illinois and cuts through the breadbasket, made famous by Dust Bowl migrants, and traffic-cone motels. Or the Blue Ridge Parkway that slices up and down Appalachia, Montana’s Going-To-The-Sun road, and California’s majestic Pacific Coast Highway.

Maybe there’s a more appropriate addition – one that speaks to our current culture of inequality, and decay: U.S Route 192, or the ‘Space Coast Parkway’, a 75-mile highway in Central Florida that stems from west of Kissimmee and deposits into the Atlantic at Melbourne – just north of Palm Bay.

It’s along this road that Andrew Ross take us in his new work, ‘Sunbelt Blues’. Part ethnography, part regional memoir and history, Ross shines a light on the thousands of people who are under-housed, or homeless, along the path of Florida’s tourist highway. The book is a chilling portrait of countless people caught in an economy that so many of us know too well by now: it’s one where workers toil at sub-living wages, fret constantly about bills, and serve to placate the exceptionally well-off.

As you may have guessed, this isn’t really a book about a road. At the bookstore, it might be listed under ‘sociology’, or ‘housing rights’, but it’s also much more than that: it’s a compelling case, fused with facts and powerful stories, that there’s a systemic underbelly of poverty and exploitation that’s frighteningly ignored and within reach.

Ross’ work takes us to a 15-mile stretch of Route 192 nestled in the heart of Osceola County. It begins west, just outside the sparkly-gates of Disneyworld, past the town of ‘Celebration’ – a proto ‘utopian’ village created by Disney in the 90s -- and into a stretch of roadway that he calls the ‘motel corridor’; a path of nearly ten miles of road jettisoned by motels, tourist traps, and homeless encampments scattered in the woods on the edge of Kissimmee. Along this stretch, thousands call the motels home, often forced to deal with degrading housing structures, antagonistic slumlords, and the ever-present fear of eviction. With public officials unwilling to address the housing crisis, what were once cheap motels built to make a buck off of tourists have now become default housing for those on the knife’s edge of homelessness.

Along 192, a land of contrasts quickly emerges. Revisiting his earlier book, ‘The Celebration Chronicles’, Ross takes us west to the town of Celebration. Planned as an idyllic americana-style hamlet with a tidy downtown center and a ring of affordable middle-class housing, Disney divested its ownership of the town in the early 2000s and sold it to a private equity firm – Lexin Capital – that left the town’s buildings rot and fall into neglect.

While we see the decline of Celebration’s white-picket-fence mentality as the perfect stand-in for the decline of the middle class, the stark inequality in the region becomes even more pronounced just a short trip north. Just outside of Disneyworld, we’re introduced to a sprawling wave of McMansions that form the bulk of the Vacation Home Rental industry – a market that had grown to $17 billion by 2017.

While these multi-million dollar homes sit unused for the vast majority of the year, just to the east along 192 a score of encampments and mini-villages have popped up in the woods and the swamplands for the local homeless. It’s here that some of Ross’ most heart-wrenching reporting comes out. Visiting a collection of the encampments -- specifically one known to the locals as the ‘Forty-Acre Wood’ -- he introduces us to a collection of the people who now call the woodlands home: the recently unemployed, those struggling with drug addiction, and some who are terminally ill and have come to slowly die in the woods.

There’s a major shadow cast over the bulk of this book -- It’s one that touches nearly everyone interviewed; motel landlords itching for guests, public officials catering to the tourism industry, real-estate speculators developing multi-million-dollar mansions for the visiting rich, and the working poor who commute from the motels and sleep in the company’s parking-lots at night, or the former employee trained by the mouse who now calls the Forty-Acre Wood home. I’m of course talking about Disney – the 93 billion dollar dumbo-like elephant in the room. In Osceola Country, it’s impossible to escape the mouse. Ross meets with a collection of Disney workers – ‘cast members’ – who balance poor pay, strenuous hours, and the gargantuan emotional labor required to work a job in the parks. There’s a real bleakness revealed at the heart of what many of these workers say, even if unconsciously; that they are paid sub-living wages to maintain a fictionalized American dream of class-blind-equity, fairy-tale happy-endings, and stability that their employer will always refuse to provide them with.

Reading this book is sort of like opening an infinite stack of nesting Matryoshka dolls – only if instead of little wooden dolls, you were uncovering an endless cycle of greed and vulture-capitalism in every single paragraph. In other hands, this book could easily be unreadable – a bad writer could make it polemical, and preachy, and even worse could pile in so many facts and figures that the heart of this crisis would be buried in abstraction. But fortunately, ‘Sunbelt Blues’ is neither. It’s at times a solid, grounded overview of the intricate factors at play in our generational crisis with neoliberalism. In others, it’s a deeply touching study and testament to the people who are affected the most by homelessness and economic exploitation. It gives space for the stories of the homeless and the under-housed – voices that barely crack through the popular narratives of national media outlets. And it’s here, arguably, that the book is strongest. It’s the interviews with the residents of the encampments that stick the most with me – especially those of Danielle Graeber, a former Disney worker who once drew guest portraits outside of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyworld and now lives in a makeshift encampment in woodlands on the edge of Kissimmee.

While the specter of Disney’s iron grip is everywhere, the book is quick to show how the housing crisis in Florida is not just a local issue stemming from a single source. The example of Celebration’s Lexin Capital is only one teeny example of a trend of private equity firms buying up affordable properties, destroying value, and selling at a profit on Wall Street. Increasingly, this is the trend of housing both nationally and globally. By 2019, an estimated $220 Billion in housing value had been transferred from individual homeowners to large companies – and those large companies are gobbling up real estate and turning renters out of working families that only a generation or two ago could have afforded homeownership. Currently, two-thirds of Orlando residents are renters. While condo and townhome sales are up in the last two years by 200 and 131 percent, respectively, in the same period single-family home sales are up only 63%.

Of course, the supply of affordable public housing is partially to blame. But there’s also the trend of declining income for the middle and working middle classes – all of which makes homeownership anywhere nearly impossible. Among Central Florida’s 280,000 hospitality workers, the median hourly wage sits at around $13 – much less than the estimated $25 an hour needed to constitute a living wage for a parent and child. With stagnant wages and the eradication of a labor movement willing to fight for increases, there’s no apparent avenue for working people to ever afford a house, let alone a one-bedroom apartment or even a shared space with roommates.

What unfolds from this is a scattershot story of suffering that makes anyone nauseous; a wave of foreclosures following the 2008 financial crisis, a loss of local tax revenues while large corporations hid away historic profits in offshore tax havens, the massive job losses at the onset of the pandemic’s shutdowns, and the uncertainty that the unhoused face while a virus plows through their local communities. At every step, the greed at the heart of short-term capitalistic thinking becomes apparent. Drunk on profit-seeking, the corporate and private actors at each pivot point in this story  --  real estate developers, landlords, private equity firms, Disney -- storm into the community, leech off of local value, and desiccate neighborhoods to such an extent that any kind of organic, stable society resilient to recession or pandemic is impossible. What follows is inevitable; a micro-level example of the collapse of the working class, and the transfer of income and wealth from poor to rich.

As much as it’s popular in many circles to poke fun at the idea of ‘the Florida man’, or the state in general as some far-off armpit, in this matter the joke’s on us. We’re no better off. Across the country incomes are falling, inequality rising. By the beginning of last year, there was over $57 billion in missing rent payments nationwide. An estimated 3.5 million people across the U.S. still teeter at the threshold of eviction, with no clear end in sight. While this book is about poverty and exploitation along a narrow strip of Central Florida, it might as well be about the country as a whole.

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A famous aphorism tells us that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ – but that line assumes two things; one, that the swell is not too large, and secondly, that we even have a boat. There’s a rising tide haunting the book, and our current lives: climate change, with its prospect of massive land loss, catastrophic superstorms, and the displacement of millions due to a collapsing climate.

There’s a ‘solution’ emerging among businesses, and private equity firms – the same entities that have gobbled up and dismantled local communities piecemeal. As Max Holleran notes in the New Republic, according to private equity and real estate developers

“…development in Central Florida can serve as a fallback for when Miami sinks underwater in the next half-century. When that happens, a dilapidated motel room may sound pretty nice for climate refugees heading north.”

If the heart of this book is any indication of the future, capitalism’s response to the climate crisis will only mirror the speculation and vulture-ism we’ve seen in housing. Ostensibly affordable housing will be planned on the peripheries, only to be siphoned off by private equity firms, drained of livability, and sold for massive profits by the people safely riding out the storm.

There’s a lingering question when considering all of this; what happens to everyone else? Let’s expand the thought; if the world is drowning, and all the life rafts are taken, how do we float? Do we hold onto the edges, and try to pull ourselves in? Do we take control? Do we build our own?

To that, there are no clear answers. To paraphrase one of the mouse’s lovable cinematic fishes; I guess we’ll just have to keep on swimming.