Brave New Home

Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing

By: Diana Lind

Narrated by: Janina Edwards

This smart, provocative look at how the American Dream of single-family homes, white picket fences, and two-car garages became a lonely, overpriced nightmare explores how new trends in housing can help us live better.

Over the past century, American demographics and social norms have shifted dramatically. More people are living alone, marrying later in life, and having smaller families. At the same time, their lifestyles are changing, whether by choice or by force, to become more virtual, more mobile, and less stable. But despite the ways that today's America is different and more diverse, housing still looks stuck in the 1950s.

In Brave New Home, Diana Lind shows why a country full of single-family houses is bad for us and our planet, and details the new efforts underway that better reflect the way we live now, to ensure that the way we live next is both less lonely and more affordable. Lind takes readers into the homes and communities that are seeking alternatives to the American norm, from multi-generational living, in-law suites, and co-living to microapartments, tiny houses, and new rural communities.

Drawing on Lind's expertise and the stories of Americans caught in or forging their own paths outside of our cookie-cutter housing trap, Brave New Home offers a diagnosis of the current American housing crisis and a radical re-imagining of future possibilities.

Great Book

This book discussed current trends and the relationship with housing. Anyone interested in housing policy should read.

Political activism & historical revisionism

This book is well read, and reasonably well written. There are few thoughts worth considering, but overall, the 1/2 of the book that I did read was agenda driven. It’s structured around black and millennial grievance, if your any other race or age, either your unfairly privileged or this author doesn’t care about you. This author flatters politicians she like (Democrat’s), is passive aggressive to those she doesn’t (republicans) even compares things to being in a political campaign headquarters...this author and her book are very politically centric, she’s just using the subject as a medium to push her politics...this book is close to false advertisement, and I’ll be asking for a refund.

Dry

I selected this book because I was interested in the subject matter. Unfortunately, it was just way too dry and lifeless for me to stick with it. I felt like I was listening to someone reading a textbook or a thesis. Oh, well, you win some you lose some.