Venice Police Department rescue crews assist residents after conducting door-to-door wellness checks in coastal areas flooded by Hurricane Helene, via VPD.
In 2009, The New Yorker ran a deeply reported story on Florida and its economy that was headlined “The Ponzi State.”
“The state’s economy depends almost entirely on growth — that is, on new arrivals and the wealth they generate in construction and real estate,” the story’s author, George Packer, pointed out. “The state’s growth machine did not depend on higher education or high-paying professional jobs; it depended on real estate and sunshine. Tourism and migration allowed Florida to become a low-tax, low-wage state, where living was relatively cheap.”
In a state whose economy is structured like a Ponzi scheme, the only requirement is that the number of suck- — er, I mean customers — continues to grow. Growth must be supported at all costs, no matter what the consequences to the water supply, the sewer systems, the amount of gridlocked traffic. If anything makes that growth falter, then the entire system grinds to a halt.
This past week, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel ran a story headlined, “Residents moving to Florida drop to levels of those who are leaving. Should we be worried?”
Say, did you just hear a grinding noise?
Quoting recent figures from Atlas Van Lines and U-Haul, the newspaper reported that “migration to Florida from other states is flattening to the extent that the Sunshine State is showing a near ‘balance’ between new arrivals and those who are leaving the state.”
An Atlas Van Lines executive pointed out that the climate-fueled hurricanes and subsequent increases in insurance rates had done what everyone believed impossible: Make Florida seem unattractive.
An Atlas Van Lines executive pointed out that the climate-fueled hurricanes and subsequent increases in insurance rates had done what everyone believed impossible: Make Florida seem unattractive.
“Now it’s one of the most expensive states to buy a home in,” she told the paper. “The average Florida property owner pays more than four times the national average for home insurance.”
All I can say to that is: Glory hallelujah!
Now, instead of building a lot of new housing, we can just take all the existing homes that are being emptied out and offer those to our new residents. We’ll tell them it’s pre-conditioned for their safety. And because these are existing homes, not new ones, we should be able to avoid building millions of dollars in new infrastructure to serve them.
The end of runaway growth should solve so many of Florida’s serious problems.
For instance, the economic watchdogs at Florida TaxWatch had predicted Florida would face a major water shortage starting this year. Now it won’t happen. Phew! We’re saved!
Cities and counties grappling with the consequences of unplanned sprawl in areas prone to flooding were considering imposing moratoriums on new development. Guess what, Manatee County and the towns of Ocoee, Edgewater, New Smyrna Beach, and Juno Beach: You don’t have to halt growth because it’s halting on its own!
The Florida Department of Traffic-nightmares — er, I mean Transportation, was planning to widen Interstate 4 again to deal with the congestion there, even though all its previous widening efforts failed to do the job. Hey, F-DOT, now you don’t have to crank up your bulldozers again! There should be plenty of room for the cars and trucks we already have. No need to plan for more!
Think of all the sewer plant expansions we can skip. Think of the rural ranchland and citrus groves that can stay rural. Think of the Florida wildlife that will be preserved from the loss of habitat.
Will this lull in our runaway growth ruin Florida’s con-based economy? Maaaaaybe.
But maybe our governor and Legislature should have thought of doing something to fix these serious problems before the cost of living here required all new residents to be as rich as Jeff Bezos.
Land by the gallon
Promoting runaway population growth has been a way of life in Florida for more than a century.
Take, for instance, the tale of Dickie Bolles. In 1908, he bought lots of Everglades swampland from the state. He then subdivided it and sold it to gullible Midwesterners as “a Garden of Eden,” “a Tropical Paradise,” and “a Promised Land.”
“Broken promises” would have been more accurate.
Buyers soon learned that the property not only hadn’t been surveyed, but much of it was also not above water. In one of the criminal trials that followed, one buyer testified that he’d bought land by the acre and land by the foot, but this was the first time he’d bought land by the gallon.
Bolles has had plenty of unscrupulous imitators. In the Marx Brothers’ first movie, “The Cocoanuts,” Groucho played a shady Florida real estate salesman of the 1920s. He responded to a question about what kind of house construction he was selling by saying: “You can have any kind of a home you want. You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stuck-oh!”
The 1920s land boom in Florida was aided by the fact that, during Prohibition, we were considered the wettest state in the Union. Smugglers snuck in illegal booze via every secluded cove they could find. Lots of Northerners moved here to participate — Al Capone was one — and invested their illicit profits in the new real estate developments springing up all over.
“It was only necessary to point carelessly to a mudhole and tell a prospect that there was his fortune,” one of Florida’s biggest ballyhoo artists, Wilson Mizner, said of this era.
Mizner is credited by some sources with creating the memorable phrase, “Never give a sucker an even break,” which is not Florida’s official state slogan but probably should be.
Developers ran rampant until a pair of hurricanes knocked everyone back on their heels. We’ve been having these cycles of boom and bust ever since, usually with no control over where the growth would occur and what it would wipe out.
Open season
People became alarmed about the consequences of all this willy nilly growth in the 1980s. Carl Hiaasen, for instance.
His first wacky crime novel, “Tourist Season,” came out in 1986. It’s about a seriously deranged South Florida newspaper columnist named Skip Wiley who forms a terrorist group to save Florida.
Their plan: Declare an open season on tourists and growth boosters in the hopes of stopping the destructive influx. Their first victim is B.D. “Sparky” Harper, the head of Miami’s Chamber of Commerce, whose body is found stuffed inside a suitcase with a toy alligator crammed down his throat.
While a success in the book sales department, “Tourist Season” failed to scare anyone away from moving to Florida. Neither have his subsequent novels (the new one, “Fever Beach,” comes out in May.)
I asked Carl via email what Skip Wiley would think about this Sun-Sentinel report, and he replied, “We’re moving in the right direction, but there’s still more work to be done.”
He was hardly the only person in the mid-1980s who was worried that unplanned growth was killing Florida.
In 1985, at the behest of then-Gov. Bob Graham, the Legislature passed a law mandating that local governments draw up comprehensive plans for where and how development would occur. The measure limited the frequency with which they could change those plans. Developers who wanted to change the map had to demonstrate a clear need for their project first.
The law required “concurrency” for all the roads, sewers, etc., so that new growth paid for itself. It also offered enhanced “citizen standing,” meaning you and I had the right to go to court and challenge government land-use decisions that seemed off-base.
Graham’s justification for doing this was that runaway growth was “killing the goose that laid the golden egg.” If no one snapped a leash on this monster, it would destroy the appeal of Florida as “a Tropical Paradise.”
Developers hated that law because they often hit a red light and didn’t like the things they had to do to make it turn green. They also hated the agency in charge of enforcing the law, the Department of Community Affairs. They hated the DCA because, over and over, it headed off bad development ideas and ensured new projects paid for the new infrastructure needed.
In 2011, under then-Gov. Rick Scott, R-NatureLosesEveryTime, they pushed through a repeal then dismantled the agency with all the care and consideration of a street gang stripping a parked car.
What we have in its place is a growth system in which every light is green, no matter what the cross traffic looks like. Whatever developers want, they generally get, regardless of what the local growth plan calls for, regardless of what the neighbors or even common sense might say.
Want to build a big condo on the beach where it will take 96 hours to evacuate in a hurricane? Of course we can do that! Want to cram some more people into the Keys regardless of the limits on water and sewer service? Sure, no problem! Want to overload Polk County’s water system so the only way to keep building is to bring up brackish water from below ground? Can do!
Amending the local growth plans, once so difficult, is now no more strenuous than picking up a burger from the McDonald’s drive-through. It’s just as pleasing to the palate, too.
Enclaves for the wealthy
One of the top DCA officials back when there was a DCA was Charles Gaultier, who worked as director of community planning from 2007 to 2011. Since then, he’s been working as a consultant fighting developer-driven changes in growth plans, which have tended to leapfrog from spot to spot, spreading sprawl.
“The leapfrog/urban sprawl amendments I have seen in recent years have been for enclaves for the wealthy promoted by the politically connected,” he told me. “I have worked with these issues in Collier County, Lee County, Sarasota County, Hillsborough County, and Martin County with little to no success. The growth management system is just too heavily stacked toward approval.”
I asked what he made of the recent lull in the growth rate, as if people suddenly figured out that Florida is no longer “a Tropical Paradise.”
“I do expect the private market will slow down investment in new housing, but I don’t see restraint coming from local governments,” he told me. “Population growth has been uneven across Florida so the flattening of overall growth will have varying implications on the development market depending on location and the market segment.”
I also contacted Haley Busch of the smart-growth group 1000 Friends of Florida.
“Our problems are NOT over,” she told me. “Florida is still a popular place to retire. The problem is that the cost of living here for young people and seniors has gone out of sight and property insurance is out of hand.”
Sure, some parts of the state have seen a considerable drop-off in new residents, she said. But other parts have not.
“We still have some of the fastest growing counties in the country,” she told me, reeling off the names Marion and Sumter as examples. Both have seen boosts from the randy retirement mecca known as The Villages.
Quite a few people are moving inland from the coastal areas, she said. They are climate refugees, pushed out by the rising sea level and higher storm surges, driven to seek higher ground.
“We’re losing land,” she pointed out. “We have to account for that as well.”
So maybe we’re not quite out of the woods yet regarding our problems with growth knocking down the woods and swamps. Maybe we’ve still got to deal with all the clogged roads, broken sewers, overstressed water supplies, and other problems.
But I’m sure the governor and Legislature will jump right on all those problems that need fixing to make Florida continue to seem attractive to new residents.
And if you believe that, Dickie Bolles has some swampland he’d like to sell you.