Max Besbris's Books

Soaking the Middle Class

Suburban Inequality and Recovery from Disaster

By: Anna Rhodes,Max Besbris

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Soaking the Middle Class

Suburban Inequality and Recovery from Disaster

By: Anna Rhodes,Max Besbris

Extreme weather is increasing in scale and severity as global warming worsens. While poorer communities are typically most vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change, even well-resourced communities are increasingly vulnerable as climate-related storms intensify. Yet little is known about how middle-class communities are responding to these storms and the resulting damage. In Soaking the Middle Class, sociologists Anna Rhodes and Max Besbris examine how a middle-class community recovers from a climate-related disaster and how this process fosters inequality within these kinds of places. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dropped record-breaking rainfall in Southeast Texas resulting in more than $125 billion in direct damages. Rhodes and Besbris followed 59 flooded households in Friendswood, Texas, for two years after the storm to better understand the recovery process in a well-resourced, majority-White, middle-class suburban community. As such, Friendswood should have been highly resilient to storms like Harvey, yet Rhodes and Besbris find that the recovery process exacerbated often-invisible economic inequality between neighbors. Two years after Harvey, some households were in better financial positions than they were before the storm, while others still had incomplete repairs, were burdened with large new debts, and possessed few resources to draw on should another disaster occur. Rhodes and Besbris find that recovery policies were significant drivers of inequality, with flood insurance playing a key role in the divergent recovery outcomes within Friendswood. Households with flood insurance prior to Harvey tended to have higher incomes than those that did not. These households received high insurance payouts, enabling them to replace belongings, hire contractors, and purchase supplies. Households without coverage could apply for FEMA assistance, which offered considerably lower payouts, and for government loans, which would put them into debt. Households without coverage found themselves exhausting their financial resources, including retirement savings, to cover repairs, which put them in even more financially precarious positions than they were before the flood. The vast majority of Friendswood residents chose to repair and return to their homes after Hurricane Harvey. Even this devastating flood did not alter their plans for long-term residential stability, and the structure of recovery policies only further oriented homeowners towards returning to their homes. Prior to Harvey, many Friendswood households relied on flood damage from previous storms to judge their vulnerability and considered themselves at low risk. After Harvey, many found it difficult to assess their level of risk for future flooding. Without strong guidance from federal agencies or the local government on how to best evaluate risk, many residents ended up returning to potentially unsafe places. As climate-related disasters become more severe, Soaking the Middle Class illustrates how inequality in the United States will continue to grow if recovery policies are not fundamentally changed.

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244

Publisher

Russell Sage Foundation

Published Date

ISBN 10

1610449169

ISBN 13

9781610449168

Upsold

Real Estate Agents, Prices, and Neighborhood Inequality

By: Max Besbris

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Upsold

Real Estate Agents, Prices, and Neighborhood Inequality

By: Max Besbris

What do you want for yourself in the next five, ten years? Do your plans involve marriage, kids, a new job? These are the questions a real estate agent might ask in an attempt to unearth information they can employ to complete a sale, which as Upsold shows, often results in upselling. In this book, sociologist Max Besbris shows how agents successfully upsell, inducing buyers to spend more than their initially stated price ceilings. His research reveals how face-to-face interactions influence buyers’ ideas about which neighborhoods are desirable and which are less-worthy investments and how these preferences ultimately contribute to neighborhood inequality. ? Stratification defines cities in the contemporary United States. In an era marked by increasing income segregation, one of the main sources of this inequality is housing prices. A crucial part of wealth inequality, housing prices are also directly linked to the uneven distribution of resources across neighborhoods and to racial and ethnic segregation. Upsold shows how the interactions between real estate agents and buyers make or break neighborhood reputations and construct neighborhoods by price. Employing revealing ethnographic and quantitative housing data, Besbris outlines precisely how social influences come together during the sales process. In Upsold, we get a deep dive into the role that the interactions with sales agents play in buyers’ decision-making and how neighborhoods are differentiated, valorized, and deemed to be worthy of a certain price.

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Page Count

228

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022672140X

ISBN 13

9780226721408

Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union

By: Max Holleran

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Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union

By: Max Holleran

This book explores travel, tourism, and urban development at the edges of Europe from the 1970s until the present. It compares tourism-spurred urban growth in Spain and Bulgaria, showing how development in Southern Europe after the fall of dictatorships provided a model for integrating post-socialist Europe in the 1990s. It analyzes the economic, cultural, and political dimensions of tourist economies, showing how they aligned with major European Union integration goals and were supported with EU development funds. It also chronicles the social and environmental costs of mass tourism where over-development has despoiled beachfronts and promoted low paying service jobs, reinforcing regional divisions in Europe between those who host and those who visit. Ultimately, it argues that while mass tourism is touted as a viable economic solution to EU inequality, it can potentially exacerbate disparities between core and peripheral zones, creating new and troubling forms of regional polarization.

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Page Count

132

Publisher

Springer Nature

Published Date

ISBN 10

9811502188

ISBN 13

9789811502187

Yes to the City

Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing

By: Max Holleran

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Yes to the City

Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing

By: Max Holleran

A fascinating account of the growing "Yes in My Backyard" urban movement The exorbitant costs of urban housing and the widening gap in income inequality are fueling a combative new movement in cities around the world. A growing number of influential activists aren’t waiting for new public housing to be built. Instead, they’re calling for more construction and denser cities in order to increase affordability. Yes to the City offers an in-depth look at the “Yes in My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement. From its origins in San Francisco to its current cadre of activists pushing for new apartment towers in places like Boulder, Austin, and London, Max Holleran explores how urban density, once maligned for its association with overpopulated slums, has become a rallying cry for millennial activists locked out of housing markets and unable to pay high rents. Holleran provides a detailed account of YIMBY activists campaigning for construction, new zoning rules, better public transit, and even candidates for local and state office. YIMBY groups draw together an unlikely coalition, from developers and real estate agents to environmentalists, and Holleran looks at the increasingly contentious battles between market-driven pragmatists and rent-control idealists. Arguing that advocates for more housing must carefully weigh their demands for supply with the continuing damage of gentrification, he shows that these individuals see high-density urbanism and walkable urban spaces as progressive statements about the kind of society they would like to create. Chronicling a major shift in housing activism during the past twenty years, Yes to the City considers how one movement has reframed conversations about urban growth.

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Page Count

216

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691259119

ISBN 13

9780691259116

Upsold

Real Estate Agents, Prices, and Neighborhood Inequality

By: Max Besbris

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Upsold

Real Estate Agents, Prices, and Neighborhood Inequality

By: Max Besbris

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N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

228

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022672140X

ISBN 13

9780226721408

Soaking the Middle Class

Suburban Inequality and Recovery from Disaster

By: Anna Rhodes,Max Besbris

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Soaking the Middle Class

Suburban Inequality and Recovery from Disaster

By: Anna Rhodes,Max Besbris

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

244

Publisher

Russell Sage Foundation

Published Date

ISBN 10

1610449169

ISBN 13

9781610449168

Book's by Max Besbris

Soaking the Middle Class

Soaking the Middle Class

Upsold

Upsold

Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union

Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union

Yes to the City

Yes to the City

Upsold

Upsold

Soaking the Middle Class

Soaking the Middle Class

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