Why the Florida Fantasy Withstands Reality - The Atlantic

[Pluvious]

Cape Coral is a microcosm of Florida’s worst impulse:
selling dream homes in a hurricane-prone flood zone. But people still want them.
By Michael Grunwald

I used Cape Coral as my Exhibit A because it’s a microcosm of Florida’s follies: a vulnerable peninsula jutting off the vulnerable peninsula, an extreme example of an unsustainable paradise built with lies on layaway. Maybe it’s unnecessary to rehash the dark side of the Florida dream while Ian is still a present-tense catastrophe, but because this state has a flair for forgetting after storms pass, here’s a quick recap.

…

Cape Coral is Florida on steroids, a comically artificial landscape featuring seven perfectly rectangular man-made islands and eight perfectly square man-made lakes. It was built by two shady brothers who made their fortunes selling scammy anti-baldness tonics, then used their talent for flimflam to sell inaccessible swampland to suckers. They didn’t bother to build sewers or parks or other infrastructure, except all those eco-destructive plumbing canals designed to dry out the floodplain and create waterfront property along their banks. It was just a real-estate play, a quarter acre in middle-class heaven for $20 down and $20 a month, and the suckers bought it, even after the hucksters got busted for fraud.

…

Environmental destruction is bad, especially for a state whose natural resources are its best selling point, and it’s a shame that the drive to tame nature that carved Cape Coral out of a swamp has been so prevalent in Florida. Fraud is also bad, and also synonymous with a state whose real-estate market has been a punch line for a century. “You can even get stucco,” the land-swindler played by Groucho Marx quipped in Cocoanuts. “Oh, how you can get stuck-oh!”

But it’s important to remember that Cape Coral’s hucksters and suckers were ultimately right. Cape Coral now has 200,000 residents. It’s got no colleges, tourist attractions, or major industries—its top employers are its government, hospital, and supermarkets—but not only is it still one of America’s fastest-growing cities, it’s projected to remain in the top five for decades to come. It’s a triumph of Lies That Came True, which was the title of a 1983 memoir by a Cape Coral pioneer, and could be the state motto.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/hurricane-ian-florida-real-estate/671629/

[CharleyDog]

1. Florida: talk to me in 10 years about "rising seas" and melting glaciers

You can't stop it now, the melt is underway, faster than expected, Florida will be underwater, not completely in ten years, but by then it will be apparent: get out.

[Jade Fox]

2. Geez. Florida is fucked.

[RAB910]

3. why am I not surprised the same people who were flimflammed by Trump get flimflammed by shady

Real estate developers?

[jimfields33]

4. Florida bashing is so last week.

There is a vast number of states that have homes and places that shouldn’t. Who’s builds in a place that has fires every year? Talk about dumb. Who builds where there’s tornadoes all the time? Who build on a fault that produces earthquakes constantly and could end up in the ocean (not could will)? Who builds in the desert where there’s no water? Seriously!

[303squadron]

5. Ole Cape Hole

Former swamp. Dredge swamp by digging canals. Use fill dirt from the dredging to build up area. Area still a former swamp and many canals exit to Caloosahatchee River which can be effected by storm surge. Cape Hole is the very essence of how not to build a city in Flowhoreda. More miles of canals than Venice, Italy!

Oh me aint got no trees
Sitting here waiting for the summertime breeze
Oh no where did they go?
Let's all move to Ole Cape Hole*

*Actual song lyrics!

P.S. My family sued the corporation that made Cape Hole over an accident......and won!

[lindysalsagal]

6. The local governments allow this crap. The state is responsible for ripping off low-income

retirees. It's one thing when the uber-rich take a risk on their 2nd, 3rd, 4th home getting swept away. They can write it off their taxes. But a government that allows people to drain their last savings on these risks is immoral and unethical.

So, florida, as a state, deserves all the negative comments it gets.