The fields have turned brown and more Floridians than ever are ready to pack up the the horse they rode in on and skedaddle.
It’s that darned economy, dontcha know? The elephant in the room, though, is this sobering truth: Florida has been selling off its future to sustain its gold-digging present for a good long while now.
In the early days, the state refused to institute an income tax in an effort to attract wealthy retirees who could move their millions south and help fuel the original land booms. Elnuestros would never argue that sunshine and beaches and golf and fishing and Mickey Mouse don’t contribute to the Florida economy, but he would suggest that all the hospitality and tourism businesses in the whole state won’t keep the new residents the state attracted at the rate of 9,000 or so per day in milk and honey.
Only one industry did that, and its name was development. From highway construction to mining fill to building docks, seawalls and pool enclosures, the state’s economic engine churned and groaned and spit out the bucks. Mortgage brokers, bankers, real estate lawyers, realtors, speculators, developers, strip-mall kings, patio-furniture magnates, septic-tank installers and unemployed carpenters, electricians and plumbers from the dying Midwest glommed onto the easy money like it was going out of style.
And it was. And now it has.
The service industry that grew up to support those new homes is struggling. People can’t write those big checks for pool cleaning and landscaping anymore. Nowhere was that more evident than walking through the Seagate community a while back. Some of those lawns looked like they belonged in Naples Park.
Gone are the days when hotel busboys and valet attendants could flip houses and make thousands “on the side.”
Is there still money in Florida? Oh yeah. But the people living in the giant mansions along Gordon Drive in Naples aren’t digging into their Lily Pulitzer Madras golf shorts to find an extra tax dollar or two. The City of Naples is probably going to stop sponsoring the Swamp Buggy Parade because a town that can block off its main drag to show off its residents’ collection of Ferraris, Maseratis and Lambos can still be too poor to let the natives strut their big-wheeled stuff once a year. City employees are being axed in the town that brags of having more Rolls-Royces and more golf courses per capita than any other city in the nation.
The service industry for that crowd –– dentists who do implants, surgeons who sculpt boobs, boat captains and personal trainers and Gulfstream pilots –– is getting by. But the construction workers who bought homes in Golden Gate Estates and figured there’d always be enough work to pay for the pool and the spa and the flat-panel teevee and the kid’s trip to Europe for her 15th birthday are finding jobs hard to come by. And with gasoline nosing toward $4 a gallon, they’re beginning to rethink the wisdom of buying that big-ass Dodge Ram Hemi given how far east they have to drive to get back to the McMansion at night.
“The public is very wearisome of the slow economic recovery, and the high frustration level of Floridians is impacting their opinion of government at every level,” Dr. Susan A. MacManus, a professor at the University of South Florida, told Leadership Florida’s annual Sunshine State Survey and Elnuestros doesn’t doubt that she’s right.
Like a joyful tourist who’s set his picnic blanket down on a fire ant hill, and is now slapping and moaning and whimpering in reaction to an attack he has no clue how to defend against, the wage-earning Floridian is being battered by a perfect storm of economic factors. But they aren’t necessarily temporary, and there’s nothing to suggest that things will ever “get better” in the sense that building cycles have in the past.
The housing bubble that fueled Florida’s Build at All Costs economy over the past 30 years hasn’t burst. It has exploded, and among the casualties of the blast were millions of dollars in wealth. Vaporized. Gone. Poof. Not coming back.
People who are underwater on their homes aren’t going to be loading the U-Haul for the trip back to Ohio because they can’t get a third of what they paid for their house. Foreclosures in Florida continue to be off the charts, especially in “working class” and “Middle Class Retiree” areas like Golden Gate Estates and Lehigh Acres.
All those hurting people came here knowing about the Sunshine Tax. But nobody told them that sunshine and palm trees and beaches aren’t worth diddly when you’re landlocked in a CBS tomb 30 miles from the Gulf with nothing in the fridge and an empty gas tank and a stack of unpaid bills and your credit cards maxed out.
Pissed about the way things turned out, upset with the “government” they see as the enemy, and flailing at enemies real and imagined, those frustrated Floridians administered their own coup de grace in November by electing as governor a shady health-care executive who pleaded the Fifth Amendment 75 times to avoid being prosecuted for his firm’s theft of millions of taxpayer dollars from Medicare.
The new governor is determined to “fix” the state’s economy by eliminating taxes for corporations, moving utility bills from corporate users onto residents, and gutting the unemployment system. He’s going to privatize prisons and schools, lay off 6,700 state employees and gut the only agency that ever stood in the way of turning the entire state into a strip mall.
Floridians aren’t just pessimistic and frustrated. They’re blind with their rage. They’ve smacked themselves right upside the head and they’re hurting too bad now to even feel it.
Yet.
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