The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It's hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.
This morning's scan of the headlines didn't particularly interest me, mostly bad news without the titillating madness of the Trump era, so I slipped into the book of the moment, The Swamp Peddlers by Jason Vuic. The narrative describes the development of much of the state in the 1950s through the vehicle of the installment land sales contract, which had been used by hucksters in the 1920s to sell submerged swampland sight unseen to Yankees hoping to escape the snow and make a quick buck. With the postwar prosperity of the 1950s, a new generation of the gullible and liquid, mostly blue collar workers from the booming industrial North, made easy marks for real estate developers who platted thousands upon thousands of 50 by 125 foot lots in places like Cape Coral (a place with no coral, and no real cape) and Port St. Lucie (which is not, and never was, a port), then sold them on an installment plan to folks who usually had never actually visited their "homesite", and had no clue that it may not be serviced by a paved road, or may hold a foot of water whenever it rained.
The developers used every slick marketing trick in the book, from boiler room call centers filled with salesmen promising the lots could only increase in value, to steak dinner sales pitches at the Toledo Holiday Inn, to planting moles with canned sales pitches in places where soon-to-be-retirees might congregate, such as Miami hotel lobbies. They pitched using glossy artist depictions of communities that never existed. They hired celebrities like Ed McMahon to sing the praises of Florida leisure living, often falsely claiming the celebrity was an owner in the planned community.
And where there was no land to develop, the peddlers simply created it. Massive dredging and bulkheading projects completely transformed the coast of southwest Florida, creating canal front lots composed of muck from the surrounding swamps. In other places, further inland, communities were criss-crossed with canals leading to nowhere, created solely to drain the land so someone could sell it. The flow of freshwater across the Everglades was wrecked by the practice, which the state countenanced with a wink and a nod.
You don't see a lot of this anymore, the fraudulent marketing or coercive sales practices or environmental degradation. A whole body of laws came out of that experience, from the Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act to environmental regulations that make it damned near impossible to build in a Florida swamp (er, I mean "wetland", which is what the environmentally woke are calling swamps these days).
But the shadows of the old developments are still everywhere in Florida. My late cousin Mike's house in Northshore, wedged between Panama City and Lynn Haven, was on a street of 1970s ranchers sitting on land created entirely from the dredged mud of the canals that surrounded them. His floors were at six feet above mean high tide--a big boat wake on a full moon high tide might swamp his living room. The Corps of Engineers would never allow that neighborhood to be built now.
A half hour north of Panama City lies Sunny Hills, a planned community created by the Deltona Corporation, a behemoth among south Florida developers, in the 1970s as a retirement mecca for upper midwestern retirees.
Deltona constructed miles and miles and miles of streets, a spiffy golf course, and of course the nice sign and fountain up front.
Then they sold maybe 10% of those lots, on which retired Lithuanian and Polish mill workers from Chicago built tiny ranchers, often with no one living within fifty lots of their little oasis in the scrub pines.
Want to know what it looks like? Here's a shot of the main drag of Sunny Hills, with four lanes and a grassy median maintained by who the hell knows.
The whole place looks like this, mile upon mile of empty residential blocks, with an occasional forlorn "for sale" sign as the last sucker looks for a successor. The closest grocery store is over twenty miles away, the nearest restaurant is clear on the other side of I-10 in Chipley.
Every parent of a teenager in Bay County knows those streets, because it is where we all took our kids to learn how to drive. We could wander the hills jumping curbs and blowing through stop signs with virtually no chance of encountering another car or another person, a stress-free environment for a fledgling driver to learn the rudiments of operating an automobile.
One of the most fascinating things about these "communities" is that not all of them stand as ghost towns. The Swamp Peddlers might lead one to believe these relics of the excesses of the '50s and '60s all failed--Lehigh Acres, with its endless grid of homesites in the steamy interior of Lee County, devoid of businesses or amenities; Golden Gate Estates, just down the road from Lehigh Acres and built on land that slopes to the southeast toward the Everglades until it is completely submerged; or my personal favorite, Rotunda West, platted in the shape of what looks like the Mayan calendar, which in the '70s marketed the project by hosting an annual event for the ABC Wide Wild of Sports that featured drunk celebrities playing golf or bowling.
The hub of the big wheel was to be a commercial center that was never built. The canals that threaded through the plat led to, well, other canals--there was no Gulf access. The eight golf courses turned into one or two.
And the victims who spent a chunk of their retirement savings on a lot there were stuck with a valueless chunk of sand and mud.
Or were they?
Rotunda West still exists, burst outside the confines of its odd little circle.
So do Lehigh Acres, Golden Gate Estates, and a host of others that were platted a half century ago.
My book seems to leave the story with developers riding into the sunset with their winnings, or sometimes to prison if their luck ran bad, while the clueless buyers were left holding the bag. And that is often exactly what happened. Perhaps the worst example is a sprawling grid in Polk County called Hunters Ridge where one might, on paper at least, own a homesite in a massive wilderness that has since been fenced off by hundreds of heavily armed survivalists who squat in the failed development with campers or tents and no sewer or running water. Think Mad Max meets Bay Point. And don't even think of driving past the fence to go visit your "homesite", at least not without wearing kevlar.
But some of these places came around if you waited long enough. Look up Rotunda or Lehigh Acres or Golden Gate Estates on realtor.com, and you'll find pages of listings for tidy stucco houses, many by their look built during the boom of the last decade or the more recent real estate frenzy. Prices range from the high 100s for the old cinder block structures of the old days to well over a million dollars for a canal front or golf course home. The population of Lehigh Acres has increased over 50% just in the last decade, to over 120,000 people. The fantasy sold by shady developers in the middle of the last century is, to some degree, actually coming to pass in this one.
Which is not to say I'd ever want to live in one of these places, or that the prediction every few years that Sunny Hills is going to "explode" with construction is any more credible now than the previous five or six times I heard it during my three decades in the panhandle. And it certainly doesn't validate the fraud perpetrated by the con men who created these places. But it does illustrate, perhaps, one of the truths I've learned practicing law in the midst of all this, and carefully observing how the wealthiest developers do it. The chance to make money tends to appear twice in the life of these planned communities--at the front end, selling to the first wave of dreamers who think they're buying a little slice of paradise as an escape from winter, or to speculators hoping to flip their contracts to a gullible purchaser for a quick profit.
Then there is the downward cycle, the bust that happens every few years in Florida, as predictable as the tides. Here is where the smart money scoops up the land that never sold, perhaps out of a bankruptcy or receivership, and the lots disappointed owners are willing to sell at a loss just to escape the consequences of their folly. Then you wait. After a time, maybe a few years, a new wave of purchasers will inevitably wash up at your door, wanting to buy those lots at an overheated market price. Just like that, you're rich.
All of this hucksterism and excess makes Florida a fascinating place to live and to practice law, although I'm finding that late middle age makes the solid, stodgy ethos of the Southern Tier of New York a better fit for me. I cannot foresee a day when I don't have a relationship with the panhandle, home for most of my adult life, but seeing it from up here gives a different perspective on the swamp peddlers I've encountered in my career, and on the place they helped create.
Meanwhile, it hasn't even made it to 60 degrees here this morning, the hills shrouded in haze and smoke from the fires out west.
A busy day of work from home, followed maybe by a little golf this evening or wings at the Elks Lodge. Or both. Who knows?
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