Underwater

How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare

By: Ryan Dezember

Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins

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 US 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. Listeners 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Thomas Dunne Books

©2020 Ryan Dezember (P)2020 Macmillan Audio

wide ranging analysis

interesting topic, narrator was excellent, the author cover a broad range of aspects of the real estate industry

Entertaining and Informative

My husband saw this book mentioned in an article and used his monthly Audible credit to buy Underwater. We decided to listen to it together since we had been through the housing crises and had come out on the other end, badly beaten. We finished this book in a few days while doing our steps in the house, oftentimes laughing at something hysterical the narrator had said. The author took what is a depressing topic and made it informative and entertaining.

If you want to know what's really going on in the real estate market, read Underwater.

Fantastic factual narrative!

Ryan Dezember's book really hit home with me. Having lived near southern Alabama for a few years, I was fascinated by his factual writing about the recent history of the real estate boom and bust in the area, while at the same time seamlessly intertwining his own home ownership adventure along with the changes and trends of the industry. Sean Patrick Hopkins' reading was not too slow, and had me hooked on the material.