Posted by Pam on July 15th, 2010 in Life in Boston, real estate advice, real estate market
It’s the time of year when we start planning which books we’re taking with us to our summer house, the beach, or maybe just to the park across the street. And since we’re consumed with real estate here at Mondoboston.com, we thought we’d run down a quick list of real estate-related books which might make for great reading for those who just can’t get enough.
1) House Lust: America’s Obsession with Our Homes. By Daniel McGinn. $14.97, Kindle edition at Amazon.com
From Publisher’s Weekly: Despite the current downturn in the housing market, the country’s mania for homes that exploded during the last half-decade is still alive and well, according to Newsweek writer McGinn. The fascination with homes—talking about, valuing, scheming over, envying, shopping for, refinancing, or just plain ogling homes—has continued even after the market has cooled, McGinn argues, and can be seen in the ongoing popularity of HGTV, the 24-7 real estate and home improvement cable channel and its flagship show, House Hunters. To prove his thesis, McGinn entertainingly explores the gamut of housing obsessions, from buying personally designed and oversized trophy homes, attempting large-scale renovations and spending obscene amounts of time on real estate Web sites such as Zillow and PropertyShark to actually going out and getting a real estate license, which McGinn himself does after only minimal training. It is this ability to get inside the actual lives of the housing-obsessed rather that relying purely on statistics to prove his point that makes this book as enjoyable as an episode of Flip This House, another popular housing reality show that McGinn cites in a book that is, at heart, all about behavior, not economics. (Dec. 26)
2. Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That Home. By Meghan Daum, $16.47 at Amazon.com
From Publisher’s Weekly: By turns disarming and tedious, Daum’s (The Quality of Life Report) cautionary tale about house lust tracks her dizzying succession of moves from New York City to Lincoln, Neb., to Los Angeles. Place becomes inextricably linked with being, and fashioning an impressive shelter creates a whole life, from choosing college at Vassar because it could ultimately secure her a shabby yet elegant prewar apartment in Manhattan to a self-empowering, self-confessed hare-brained relocation at age 29—single, and now an established journalist and author—to the plains of Nebraska to achieve the perpetually elusive domestic integrity. Desiring to be that person who deserved to have the perfect living situation, Daum is seized by full-blown real-estate addiction, despite her inability to afford anything like her dream place, and she eventually migrates from the modest charms of a Lincoln farmhouse to the parched crevices of L.A., where she aims to write a screenplay. Here the locus of her memoir fixes on the purchase of a dilapidated bungalow in Echo Park in 2004: becoming a homeowner translates into being an evolved human. Alas, the outcome is sadly predictable, even the finding-the-man-to-fill-the-house with, but Daum’s treading in the wake of the burst housing bubble is sweet and timely. (May)
3. Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown. By Edmund L. Andrews, $14.94 at Amazon.com.
From Publisher’s Weekly: Starred Review. As I write in February 2009, I am four months past due on my mortgage and bracing for foreclosure proceedings to begin. Thus begins this cautionary and critical examination of the housing crisis, a story that turned personal when New York Times economics reporter Andrews got caught up in the housing bubble after falling in love with a woman and a house. Bringing in $120,000 a year in salary—most of which went to child support and alimony to his ex-wife, Andrews says he was able to get a don’t ask, don’t tell mortgage with the assumption that his new wife, Patty, would be able to get a job to keep them afloat, an expectation that didn’t work out as planned. Because of his economics journalism background, Andrews says he should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, and he castigates himself as well as fellow borrowers, the financial industry that took advantage of them and a government that didn’t put the brakes on the crisis that many economists warned about but that Alan Greenspan, the Bush administration and others ignored. This deeply personal exposé is timely and sobering in its candor. (June)
4. Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses. By Marjorie Garber, $12.82 on Amazon.com.
From Publisher’s Weekly: Anyone who has looked, even casually, at what are called “shelter” magazines, or who has engaged in the exhausting process of buying or selling property, will have been struck by the peculiarly erotic quality of the language used to describe the houses we live in or seek to own. Perhaps prompted by her own foray into real estate, Garber, author of Symptoms of Culture and Dog Love, among many other books, applies her richly stocked scholarly imagination to a consideration of the cultural role of the house. In a series of witty essays on the “House as Mother,” as “Beloved,” as “Body,” as “Trophy” and the like, Garber segues smoothly in the course of a page or two from Freud and Jung to Chaucer, Shakespeare and popular film, effectively elaborating her contention that the house is not just something on which we lavish our erotic or emotional attention in lieu of a more appropriate object, but is also “a primary object of affection and desire.” As a professor of English at Harvard and director of its Humanity Center, Garber is an established academic. While dazzling, her erudition is not intimidating; this book is bound to prompt lively after dinner discussion and perhaps a little abashed self-recognition in the nation’s suburban great rooms and downtown lofts. (July)
5. Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us. By Alyssa Katz, $15.55 on Amazon.com.
From Publisher’s Weekly: Starred Review. This richly detailed analysis of the recent (and ignominious) history of the American real estate market opens on a note of false optimism: in 1991, after 20 years of toil, urban housing activist Gale Cincotta successfully argued that Congress should require that 40% of the home loans issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac go to low-income buyers. The Clinton administration extended this campaign for higher ownership rates among low-income populations throughout the 1990s. Katz, a journalism professor at New York University, draws on an impressive number of interviews and thorough secondary research to illuminate the disastrous consequences of pushing underqualified buyers into ownership. Many of the topics she addresses will be familiar to readers by now—predatory subprime loans, get-rich-quick house flipping schemes, scandalous mortgage frauds—but Katz writes with authority and empathy. The many people the author interviews, from the single mother in Cleveland who lost her house just two years after buying it to the family living near Sacramento whose new home is already falling apart, become the heroes, victims and sometimes culprits in this gripping account of collective irresponsibility. (June)
