FAR FROM HOME

The first major book to reveal how skyrocketing global real estate prices are permanently changing urban neighbourhoods—and our ideas of home.

Sky-high prices in major cities around the world have made housing unaffordable to an unprecedented number of people. Far from Home shows how this shift will play out, launching the era of the mega-house, renovictions, boomtowns, and the emergence of the empty neighborhood. In boots-to-the-ground reportage, Gold travels to the gateway cities hardest hit: Vancouver, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, London, Sydney, and Melbourne, as well as to cities that are just starting to transform, such as Seattle and Portland. We see the ingenious solutions people are finding to deal with the situation: from friends purchasing property together to families raising their kids on sailboats, living full-time on the seas; we meet mega commuters and millennials renting neglected mansions owned by global investors. Through extensive interviews with realtors, developers, politicians, and everyday residents, as well as original research from housing analysts, Gold shows the human face behind one of the century's greatest transformations.

KERRY GOLD has been a full-time journalist for twenty-two years. She's been a weekly columnist at The Globe and Mail for the last nine years, writing a popular real estate and housing column. She writes for several magazines about real estate and business, including the Globe's Report on Business, Walrus, BC Business, MoneySense and Vancouver Magazine. Gold has ghostwritten several books, including Michael Bublé's bestselling memoir Onstage, Offstage, for Penguin Random House U.K. A recent feature article about
housing unaffordability that she wrote for Walrus magazine, Canada's version of Atlantic, is the most-read article in the magazine's history. She lives in Vancouver, where single-family house prices rose to an average of $2.87 million this year.