Gimme Shelter [Hardcover]

Mary Elizabeth Williams (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 3, 2009

"Of course I want a home," writes Mary Elizabeth Williams, "I'm American." Gimme Shelter is the first book to reveal how this primal desire, "encoded into our cultural DNA," drove our nation to extremes, from the heights of an unprecedented housing boom to the depths of an unparalleled crash.

As a writer and parent in New York City, Williams is careful to ground her real-estate dreams in the reality of her middle-class bank account. Yet as a person who knows no other way to fall in love than at first sight, her relationship with the nation's most daunting housing market is a passionate one. Williams's house-hunting fantasy quickly morphs into a test of endurance, as her search for a place to live and a mortgage she can afford stretches into a three-year odyssey that takes her to the farthest reaches of the boroughs and the limits of her own patience.

"Welcome to the tracks," she declares at the outset of yet another weekend tour of blindingly bad, wildly overpriced properties. "Let's go to the wrong side of them, shall we?" As her own quest unfolds, Williams simultaneously reports on the housing markets nationwide. Friends and family members grapple with real estate agents and lenders, neighborhood and quality-of-life issues, all the while voicing common concerns, as expressed by this Maryland working parent of three: "The market was so hot, there were no houses. We looked for years at places the owners wouldn't even clean, let alone fix up."

How frustrating is the process? Williams likens it to hearing "the opening bars of a song you think is 'Super Freak.' And then it turns out to be 'U Can't Touch This.'" Told in an engaging blend of factfinding and memoir, Gimme Shelter charts the course of the real estate bubble as it floated ever upward, not with faceless numbers and documents but with the details of countless personal stories -- about the undeniable urge to put down roots and the lengths to which we'll go to find our way home.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Williams, a freelance journalist, provides a blow-by-blow account of the recent inflation of the real estate bubble and its economic—and emotional—impact on middle-class families like her own. The author paints a vivid picture of the crisis in New York City, where even with a housing budget of $400,000, she and her husband found only properties that provided less than 1,000 square feet of living space or were located under bridges or facing expressways or were in dire need of six-figure renovation. She provides cogent explanations of the recent financial crisis and foreshadows its still-developing repercussions, given that she is one of the millions who signed onto an Alt-A (not quite prime) mortgage. Her family's search for a home and their journey through the mire of the New York real estate market rises to affecting heights and is a compelling, clearly written story that will interest anyone seeking a personal perspective on the causes, depth and long-term consequences of the financial crisis and the ramifications of past and current policy decisions. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Williams had a young daughter and was considering having another child when the tinyness of the family’s Brooklyn apartment, the pressure of the New York housing market, and the house-hunting and -buying activities of friends all brought to a fever pitch her own desire to take the plunge into home ownership. Over a three-year period that included the birth of a second daughter, Williams discovered the alarming pace of gentrification in New York, the maddening inverse relationship between home price and mortgage rate (when one was rising, the other was falling), the dizzying array of elements that go into buying a home (from finicky co-op boards to snippy real-estate brokers and lenders), and the widening gap between those who can and do own their homes and those who don’t. Loath to leave their beloved Brooklyn, Williams and her husband looked further and further afield, pondering the similar moves their friends were making across the nation. In this engaging and personal look at the home-buying process, Williams takes the reader on an emotional roller coaster of fear and envy as she illuminates some of the market pressures that lie behind the nation’s current financial crisis. --Vanessa Bush

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1 edition (March 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416557083
• ISBN-13: 978-1416557081
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #235,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars 3 stars, one for each time I laughed July 11, 2009

By Someone Like You

Format:Hardcover

MBW can definitely write. There are some phrases in this book that made me laugh out loud. Like..."It's half-past get the BLEEP out of here" and "Once you get above 125th street it's all spanking and cockfighting, which is not as good as that might initially sound." And, the idea for the book is a good one: what's it like to be a middle-income (truly middle-income) family of 4 in search of affordable housing in New York City? It's a quick read but ultimately the book collapses under a mountain of minutia (I had lunch here, I told my husband this, my kid did this, it was sunny, it was cloudy), platitudes about New York and a sophmoric paint-by-numbers structure that goes something like this: 2 pages detailing her real estate or other neurosis-of-the-day, 3 pages on her search, a sentence or two of stats, a dash of sarcasm and then a quick annecdote about a friend's real estate quest. These annecdotes are interesting at first but by the 15th they blend together into meaningless uniformity: JL and BK loved New York, left New York and now live somewhere else, pay less and love it. Repeat.

Buy it used in paperback on Amsterdam and read it on a bumpy flight to Vegas.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars First aid for the pain of real estate March 7, 2009

By Liz L.

Format:Hardcover

Very, very funny. I only wish we had this hilarious handbook during the two miserable years we spent searching for plausible, affordable real estate within commuting distance of Manhattan.

30 of 40 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars The moaning of the plagued privileged is not a pretty sound. March 9, 2009

By Alexandra Henshel VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Gimme Shelter: Ugly Houses, Cruddy Neighborhoods, Fast-Talking Brokers and Toxic Mortgages: My Three Years Searching For The American Dream is the whole overblown title, which promises much more than is delivered in this surprisingly weightless book.

For 310 pages, Williams moans with the dreadfully self-conscious tone of the plagued priviliged, and it is not a pretty sound.

The book is not, as implied, a look at the greater collapse of the American housing industry or what have you- it is a great whine about how she (freelance writer for publications such as Salon) and her husband Jeff (on-and-off employed copy editor) couldn't afford to buy in Brooklyn's Carrol Gardens during the housing boom.

Considering that they had lived there for years before prices skyrocketed, it seems rather sour grapes of her how much she bitches and squeaks about those friends of theirs who did buy early and made mad money from their foresight, and what she has to say about those dreadful new rich people who priced her out of what she clearly felt was rightfully her cool neighborhood- well, you can practically see her stamping her little feet.

She did have the grace to realize, close to the end of the book, that what she and Jeff were doing by buying and tarting up a place in way way uptown Manhattan (Inwood) was the same thing the wealthy were doing in Carroll Gardens- gentrification, lady. The rock stars priced you out of your neighborhood, now you're doing it to the residents of Inwood Park, the immigrants and the elderly....

I grow weary of these- The House on First Street, about the terrible agonies of restoring one's mansion in post-Katrina New Orleans, Not Buying It, (incidentally also set in smug-as-hell Brooklyn) about the fearsome self-denial it took not to recreationally shop for a year, Bitter is the New Black, whose loathsome author memorably carried a Prada bag to the unemployment office...

In times of such turbulence, it's a turnoff. Read more ›

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, Fun, Informative-and a good read! February 25, 2009

By K. J. DellAntonia

Format:Hardcover

I just finished Gimme Shelter, and even though I was reading ever faster to see how the personal story that's woven through the book ended, I'm sorry it's over. It's the real estate bubble from the inside, told in a funny and searingly honest voice that puts even the whole sub-prime mess in terms we can understand. Mary Elizabeth Williams was in the thick of it, trying to buy in New York City, one of the most overheated markets out there, and she deftly intersperses her experience with what's going on all across the country, offering pricelessly lucid explanations for everything from no-interest loans to the mortgage default rate in between descriptions of apartments with triangular bedrooms and stoveless kitchens bordering graveyards and expressways, all at prices that any New Yorker will recognize and everyone else will blanch at. It's a good story, an engaging memoir and an informative read all in one.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars truthful and hilarious February 28, 2009

By N. Griffin

Format:Hardcover

gimme shelter is mary elizabeth williams' quest for a simple reasonably-priced home. and what does she get? more monsters, setbacks and double crosses than frodo and his fellowship.
apparently real estate folk have more nifty lies than a bar full of frat boys and williams tell us all about them. the writing is precise, honest and very funny. if one got paid for laughs generated Mary Elizabeth Williams would be a wealthy landowner with many cows by now.
read this book in the warmth and comfort of your undersized, overpriced but rent stabilized apartment and feel good about yourself. apartments - they aren't just for losers anymore.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Stressful and timely, in the good way. April 21, 2009

By Phil Madman

Format:Hardcover

I've not yet gone home shopping myself, but after reading this book I feel as though I already have. Every challenge and heartbreak, elation and fall, every pressure point the world could push on, they're all there.

Somehow however, Ms Williams' wit and way with words make the journey both an adventure and a joy to read. You may shake your fists at the world from time to time while reading, but in the end you may have an appreciation of the fact that sometimes the best things in life cost $400,000 plus 8.5% interest for the next 30 years.