Swamp Peddlers
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A01=Jason Vuic
Author_Jason Vuic
Cape Coral
Category=WQH
Deltona
Elderly in Florida
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
Florida
History of Florida
History of the New South
Land Development in Florida
Land Sales in Florida
Land Scams in Florida
Lehigh Acres
Palm Bay
Planned Communities in Florida
Port Charlotte
Port St. Lucie
Real Estate in Florida
Retirees in Florida
Retirement Communities in Florida
Spring Hill
Subdivisions in Florida
Suburbs in Florida
Urban Planning in Florida
Product details
- ISBN 9781469663333
- Weight: 385g
- Dimensions: 195 x 231mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jun 2021
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Florida has long beckoned retirees seeking to spend their golden years in the sun, but, for many, the American dream of owning a home there was financially impossible. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called "installment land sales industry" appeared out of nowhere to hawk billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded homesite that would be waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build. The result created Cape Coral, Port St. Lucie, Deltona, Port Charlotte, Palm Coast, and Spring Hill, among many others-sprawling exurban communities with no downtowns and little industry but millions of residential lots.
As Jason C. Vuic recounts in this raucous history, these communities allowed generations of northerners to move to Florida cheaply, but at a price: high-pressure sales tactics begat fraud; poor urban planning begat sprawl; developers cleared forests, drained wetlands, and built thousands of miles of roads in grid-like subdivisions, which, fifty years later, played an inordinate role in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.
As Jason C. Vuic recounts in this raucous history, these communities allowed generations of northerners to move to Florida cheaply, but at a price: high-pressure sales tactics begat fraud; poor urban planning begat sprawl; developers cleared forests, drained wetlands, and built thousands of miles of roads in grid-like subdivisions, which, fifty years later, played an inordinate role in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.
Jason C. Vuic is the author of The Yucks!: Two Years in Tampa with the Losingest Team in NFL History and The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History.
