Customer Reviews

Gimme Shelter

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The yearning for a nest -- including a bedroom with a door -- is universal, but this enjoyable book is very specific. Instead of trudging through a national survey of how the real estate market overheated, we follow one middle class working woman and her family as they struggle to find a modest apartment for what is, in almost any other part of the country, a ridiculous sum. You'll laugh; you'll cry...

I went into this book expecting a personal, possibly painful, and certainly funny memoir. While I found all that, I was thoroughly impressed by the author's ability to simplify mortgage-speak and explain the crazy sub-prime mortgage industry. This book couldn't be more timely, but that's not really why you should read it.

I couldn't put it down. I was simultaneously informed, entertained, and pained as I rooted for this family to find a home. Read this book for the sheer enjoyment of a well-written memoir.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, her husband and two daughters's search for a home in New York City is recounted in Gimme Shelter- Ugly Houses, Cruddy Neighborhoods, Fast-talking Brokers, and Toxic Mortgages: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream.

Timing is everything, and Mary Elizabeth and her husband started their search in 2003,at the height of the home buying insanity. After living in a cramped apartment with one daughter and another on the way, she convinced her husband it was time to look for a home of their own.

If there is anything harder than finding an affordable rental unit in NYC, it's finding an affordable condo, co-op or home to buy. Williams places her story in the perspective of the national experience. Many of her friends were buying homes across the country, and she tells their different stories- from San Francisco to post-Katrina New Orleans to St. Louis to Minnesota.

Williams and her husband lived in Brooklyn, and they loved it there, so it was there that their search began. She figured they could afford a $350,000 mortgage, but everything in that price range was awful, filthy with missing stairs, sagging porches and a home that had mushrooms growing inside the house.

Brooklyn was becoming as expensive as Manhattan, as Manhattanites were spreading over the bridge and making real estate prices skyrocket. Getting a mortgage was a scary proposition as well. While Williams and her husband had excellent FICO scores, they did not have the 20% required for a down payment.

No problem; this is where the creative ideas of mortgage brokers come in. They could get a no-doc loan. This type of loan requires no pesky checking by the bank to see if the information provided by the prospective buyers on salary and credit history is accurate. Williams humorously described this type of loan as the banking industry's version of "don't ask, don't tell". While Williams and her husband were good credit risks, other people who received no-doc loans were not; thus created the housing crisis that tanked our economy.

For three long years, Williams and her husband looked at condos, co-ops and houses. They finally found a co-op they liked in a neighborhood that, although far from Brooklyn, had a big park, a grocery store, decent schools, and most importantly a nearby subway station. (Anyone who lives in New York understands how crucial that is.)

There is as much suspense as in a Stephen King novel as they wait for approval by the co-op board in a timely manner in order to get the low interest rate they need to afford the bank loan.

This is a timely book, as Williams shares her personal story of looking for the American dream of home ownership in the context of the beginning of the housing crisis. It is immensely readable, reading almost like a novel, and if you have ever bought a house, you will relate to her story.

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.

Mary Elizabeth Williams deftly weaves her story of braving the Brooklyn/Manhattan real estate market with pithy analysis of the housing bubble - and how it burst. Entertaining, witty, and informative, this book gives hope for all of us renters in NYC that one day we too may have that tiny slice of the American Dream. This was one of the few books I stayed up all night to read.