Housing Crisis

An urgent and illuminating examination of the unrelenting housing crisis Canadians find ourselves facing, by Balsillie Prize finalist and CBC Radio host Gregor Craigie, A Crumbling Foundation offers real-life solutions from around the world and hope for new housing innovation in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles.

The last acceptable form of prejudice in America is based on class and executed through state-sponsored economic discrimination. While the American meritocracy officially denounces prejudice based on race and gender, it has spawned a new form of bias against those with less education and income. Millions of working-class Americans have their opportunity blocked by exclusionary snob zoning. These government policies make housing unaffordable, frustrate the goals of the civil rights movement, and lock in inequality in our urban and suburban landscapes.

There was no single, dramatic event that set the current financial crisis off. A whole series of very questionable decisions by many people, in many places, over a period of years, built up the pressures that led to a sudden collapse of the housing market and of financial institutions that began to fall like dominoes as a result of investing in securities based on housing prices. This book is designed to unravel the tangled threads of that story.

In just over three years, real estate giant Tishman Speyer and its partner, BlackRock, lost billions of investors' dollars on a single deal. In Other People's Money, Charles V. Bagli, the New York Times reporter who first broke the story of the sale of Stuyvesant Town - Peter Cooper Village takes listeners inside the most spectacular failure in real estate history, using this single deal as a lens to see how and why the real estate crisis happened.

Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America's racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s.

On any given night, there are over 643,000 homeless people residing in shelters and on the streets across America. What can we do to help? Listen for more.

Millennials are the first generation in Ireland to be worse off than their parents. Trapped in a game of rental roulette, stuck living at home as adults, and many on the brink of homelessness, the Irish housing crisis has defined the lives of an entire generation—and it is set to continue. With housing costs in Ireland the highest in the EU, the property ladder has been kicked from under thousands. So how did we get here…and how do we break the cycle?

It is no secret; housing has reached unprecedented levels of unaffordability. Anybody participating in or paying attention to this market has likely been taken aback by the current state of affairs. Why is this happening? Who is to blame? Can we expect it to settle down? These are but a few of the questions answered in this exciting book about the current state of the housing market. Filled with both analytical data and anecdotes alike, you can come away with a new depth of understanding into the differing aspects affecting our housing market.

An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out worker in southern Florida obsessively photographing thousands of abandoned objects left behind by the evicted families. A group of young people squatting in an apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world. William Wyler's 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives. These are just some of the elements Auster magically weaves together in this immensely moving novel about contemporary America and its ghosts.

In 2006, Ben S. Bernanke was appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, capping a meteoric trajectory from a rural South Carolina childhood to professorships at Stanford and Princeton, to public service in Washington's halls of power. There would be no time to celebrate, however - the burst of the housing bubble in 2007 set off a domino effect that would bring the global financial system to the brink of meltdown.

For generations, homeownership has been an avenue to a better life. But discriminatory policies left many people out, and today’s trend of rising home prices continues to put housing beyond the reach of significant sectors of the workforce. This is particularly true in America’s urban centers, where a shortage of affordable housing is stifling social and economic mobility.

The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.

The Ponzi Housing Scheme is the financial crime of the 21st century. It makes Madoff look like an amateur because of scale. The crime was sophisticated in it's plan. This crime violated laws on the books. It violated laws that should be on the books. And it violated the trust that people have with the banking community, and this violation reaches to the highest bankers in the land and off our shores. This crime is complex, but it is not rocket science. The proof of culpability can be known.