Gimme Shelter: Ugly Houses, Cruddy Neighborhoods, Fast-Talking Brokers, and Toxic Mortgages: My Thre

Mary Elizabeth Williams doesn’t want it all. She just wants some of it—a home namely, one in New York City, the land that she loves.

Williams, a longtime writer and editor for Salon, as well as contributor to the NY Observer, the New York Times, and The Takeaway, offers up her desires in the form of her memorably funny, brutally honest, and occasionally gut-wrenching memoir, Gimme Shelter: Ugly Houses, Cruddy Neighborhoods, Fast-Talking Brokers, and Toxic Mortgages: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream. The book is her decision to take the universal desire to find a home and funnel it through her specific experience, bringing her family, her friends, and the subprime mortgage crisis with us down this yellow brick road. While timing plays a part in any memoir, hers is uncanny: Williams’ story began in the midst of the 2003 housing bubble, and her memoir publishes as American home ownership shakes in the face of bad mortgages, foreclosures, and community turmoil across the country.

As you were writing about your own personal housing crisis, did you sense where the narrative of the American housing mess was going? And if so, how did that affect your writing?
I kept thinking that this was a lot like it was during the dot com boom, where people were handing you the idea of money rather than real money. The idea of value and the idea of prosperity, which is different than real value and worth and prosperity. And I remember going to these open houses and seeing people open up their checkbooks and feeling like I had the whole Gavin de Becker Gift of Fear feeling. I had realtors show me financing sheets where I didn’t have to pay any money. And then they’d show you what you’d be paying every month. I thought: this is bad, really bad, like, horror-movie bad. And this was definitely a story I needed to tell.

In many ways, I read this as a book about the death of the middle class in New York City.
Aside from my own obviously very personal stake in it all, I also believe we urgently need to keep the middle class and the working creative class in our cities. The U.S. is becoming a much more urban nation. We have more people living in cities than ever in our history. Yet the middle class population in New York City has been steadily declining since the seventies. Cities need to have regular people in them–people who work in offices and restaurants, people who are making music, and writing copy. If it’s all the very rich and the very poor and the tourists, there goes your public school system. There go your non-Phantom-of-the-Opera-related arts. That’s really bad for everybody. Because we’re not all going back to the farm. So we have to figure out how to make our urban areas sustainable. Basically, I think if I leave New York it’s the end of civilization. Not to alarm you or anything.

http://www.smithmag.net/memoirville/2009/03/09/interview-mary-elizabeth-williams-author-of-gimme-shelter/