The History of Florida (109 page)

lish speakers. Moreover, large numbers of upwardly mobile Cubans and

Latinos have migrated northward to Broward and Palm Beach Counties,

an ethnic version of white flight. The newcomers came in great numbers,

and their communities were constantly being replenished by new waves of

exiles and refugees. They maintained their old-country cultures to a great

degree, developed their own brand of exile and ethnic politics, established

and succeeded wildly with their own enclave economies, and competed vig-

orously with native Anglos and African Americans for economic and politi-

cal power. The conflict between blacks and Hispanics has been especial y

notable, and African Americans general y believe that they have been “dis-

placed from mainstream opportunities by the newly arrived immigrants.”10

Older patterns of assimilation seemed not to apply in south Florida, which

has emerged as a new multicultural cauldron and perhaps as a model for

what the state as a whole might become.

Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty: A Social History of Modern Florida · 521

In 1980, in dramatic spasms of pathos and chaos, images of black Hai-

tians washing ashore in South Florida splashed on evening newscasts. Some

observers estimate that 50,000, perhaps 60,000, Haitians entered Florida in

the exodus of the “boat people.” If south Florida and immigration officials

recoiled at the influx of black Haitians, Miami welcomed, at least initial y,

the first wave of 125,000 Marielitos from Cuba. For two decades, Cuban

émigrés had been largely middle-class and white. Mariel changed the dy-

namics. Large numbers of poor and black Cubans—about one in five Mari-

elitos—flooded Miami. Marielitos also included criminals and the mental y

il . To be sure, the experience was traumatizing—one book described Miami

as a “city on the edge.”11 On Mariel’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the
Miami

Herald
concluded: “Mariel nudged Hispanics close to a numerical majority

in Miami. It also laid the foundation for today’s Cuban-American politi-

cal dominance.” In 2005, Maurice Ferre, who had been the city’s embattled

mayor in 1980, reflected: “Time heals a lot of things. The question is this: Are

the Mariel Cubans net givers or net takers? They are by far net givers.”12

In reality, multicultural change has spread far beyond Miami and south

Florida to distant parts of the state. The Latinization of Florida has been well

under way for decades, leaving almost no part of the state untouched. Large

communities of Mexicans have settled in rural parts of central Florida, such

proof

as Hardee and Highlands Counties. Puerto Ricans, many of them migrants

from New York, surpass all other Hispanic groups in metropolitan Orlando.

Guatemalans and Salvadorans labor in agriculture and landscaping in north

and south Florida. Political unrest and social anxieties in South America

have brought large numbers of Venezuelans, Colombians, and Brazilians

to south Florida.
Florida
Trend’s
2012 “Floridian of the Year” was Brazil.

Jamaicans, Dominicans, and other black islanders from the Caribbean have

established large communities in Dade and Broward Counties. Vietnamese

fishermen have become an economic force in Pensacola and the Panhandle

coastal region. Asians, primarily from India, China, Korea, and the Phil-

ippines, comprise Florida’s fastest-growing immigrant group. Census offi-

cials struggle to create new categories for Chinese Jamaicans and Brazilian

Cubans.

For decades, Sunbelt states such as Florida, California, and Texas have

been on the edge of a global migration of workers and refugees from poorer

and less-developed countries and regions. Given the instability of the Third

World, especial y Latin America and the Caribbean, Florida’s future will

be tied even more closely to geopolitics and national foreign policy. A new

“Columbian exchange” has taken place—an exchange that is happening now

522 · Raymond A. Mohl and Gary R. Mormino

on the streets, in the schools, in the workplace, in the supermarkets, even in

politics in some places. Ethnical y and social y, the new Florida has become

more multicultural, more ethnical y and linguistical y diverse, more Catho-

lic and Latin than the old, and ever more different from the rest of the South.

In many ways, Florida offers a glimpse of what America will become. Rec-

onciling increasing numbers of senior citizens with new immigrants and

established citizens will be a great challenge. New tensions in race relations

in the post–civil rights era and new waves of exiles and refugees from the

south have unalterably transformed Florida and the way people at home and

abroad perceive the Sunshine State.

The dizzying pace of new immigration and the chal enges the immi-

grants pose suggest that big change has its costs. In fact, the rapid growth

of Florida since midcentury should not be interpreted entirely as a success.

Modern Florida may be a developer’s dream, but it is an environmentalist’s

nightmare. Dense urban development along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts

has destroyed much of the tropical al ure of old Florida and left millions of

residents vulnerable to hurricane damage. Urban sprawl has been gobbling

up rich agricultural land in south Florida, and the builders and developers

seem unstoppable. In central Florida, periodic freezes have damaged cit-

rus crops and forced orange growers to move farther south, leaving aban-

proof

doned grove lands to suburban Orlando and Polk County developers. Ur-

ban development has encroached on the edges of the Everglades for many

decades, threatening the underground aquifer that serves as a water supply

for 5 million people in south Florida. Overdevelopment in the Florida Keys

has produced a pol uted paradise, killing off remaining live coral reefs and

threatening marine life. The paving of paradise continues unabated.

Among Florida’s other problems, the massive surge of immigrants has

created ethnic and social tensions, especial y in metropolitan Miami. Riot-

ing and racial conflict have pockmarked Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, and

other Florida cities. By the 1980s, Florida had the highest crime rate in the

nation, and for a time Miami had an unenviable reputation as the drug and

murder capital of the United States—witness the popular imagery of “Co-

caine Cowboys” and the film “Scarface” (1983). Crime, drug dealing, and

random violence increasingly shape public images of Florida as “the lost

paradise.”13 If Florida had a quaint charm and appeal in the late nineteenth

century, little of that natural and innocent quality remains at the dawn of

the twenty-first century.

All of these problems have been magnified by a weakly developed public

sector—a political and governmental system that routinely avoids important

Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty: A Social History of Modern Florida · 523

action addressing the state’s social problems. The state legislature more often

than not mimics the political gridlock that has characterized the nation’s

capital in recent decades. Political leaders seem more interested in low taxes

than needed public investment in education, social services, infrastructure,

growth management, or environmental protection. Boasting a relatively

high per capita income, Florida has no income tax and relies almost entirely

on sales taxes, tourist taxes, and a lottery to support state government ac-

tivities and services. Few state leaders seem ashamed that Florida’s support

for higher education is eroding, or that the state’s public schools are badly

overcrowded and notoriously undersupported, or that Florida ranks high

among the states in the number of prison inmates per capita. High social

service demands, especial y among the young and the elderly, are met mini-

mal y by governmental programs. In recent decades, the Sunshine State has

cast some ominous shadows.

But still they came. Nothing, it seemed, could deflate or derail the Flor-

ida Boom. For decades, Cassandras and Jeremiahs had warned that Flor-

ida stood on the eve of destruction. The new century and millennium has

chal enged the most ardent boosters. Whipsawed by political storms and

ballot-chasing lawyers in the 2000 presidential election, Florida was whip-

lashed by real storms and more lawsuits in 2004. In a span of forty-four

proof

days, four powerful hurricanes crisscrossed the state. The Sunshine State,

quipped pundits, had become the Plywood State and the National Disaster

State. The hurricanes wrought terrible havoc and destruction, but Charley,

Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne curiously brought Floridians together in ways the

state’s geography and politics have not.

These were not the first hurricanes or even the most expensive hurricanes

to slam Florida. In August 1992, Hurricane Andrew pummeled south Flor-

ida with the force of a Category 5 storm, leaving in its wake 65,000 homes

destroyed, 175,000 people homeless, and insurance companies in shambles.

Until Hurricane Katrina, which flooded New Orleans in 2005, Andrew was

the costliest hurricane in American history: $26 billion in today’s dol ars.

Hurricane Andrew’s legacy is mixed: the good news is that the disaster

forced new building codes with hurricane-resistant features; the bad news

is that the storm also flattened the insurance business. Few Floridians have

confidence that Citizens, the new state insurer, can survive the next disaster.

Still they came. Mere months later, after having been battered by Hurri-

cane Ivan, property values escalated along Pensacola Bay. Overal , Florida’s

population surged, rising by 600,000 from 2000 to 2005. If Floridians had

adopted a state conversation topic, it might have been the question: How

524 · Raymond A. Mohl and Gary R. Mormino

much has my house appreciated? How much since last week? An amenities

revolution saw houses soar in price and size. It was a flipper’s paradise. Not

even hurricanes, fast-buck artists, and naysayers could stop the boom.

In April 2006, the
Florida
Trend
cover story was titled “1,060 New Florid-

ians Every Day.”14 Reporters tracked the paths of newcomers and concluded

that on a typical winter day, the state added 1,060 new residents. Such was

not news. Floridians had been adding a thousand newcomers daily for de-

cades, but these figures were revealing. In reality, ful y 1,890 newcomers

were arriving daily, but alarmingly, 946 Floridians were leaving. Few Florid-

ians ever asked, and even fewer had answers for the question, “What will

happen when a thousand newcomers stopped coming?” Floridians quickly

found out when days fol owing the
Florida
Trend
publication, the Great

Recession shook Florida to its roots.

Few Floridians could recall the Florida Bust that pricked the Land Boom

in 1926. History may not repeat itself, but in Florida it rhymes. “Under the

blistering heat of this tropical Florida sun,” observed a journalist, “there lie

a thousand developments scattered about the State . . . with here and there

a half-completed building, a former field office or a lonesome shack, mark-

ing the graves of the hopes of armies of investors a year ago.”15 The year was

1926! In 2009, George Packer took readers for a tour of the “ghost subdivi-

proof

sions” of Pasco County, a place that had grown from 20,000 residents in

1950 to a half million in 2008, and then crashed.16

In November 1925, Jacksonville newsboys hawked newspapers with the

sensational headline: “Ponzi in Jax! Promises Comeback!” Indeed, Charles

(Carlo) Ponzi, having been convicted for a financial pyramid scheme that

gave his name to a crime, moved to Jacksonville (and later, Tampa), to re-

cruit more suckers. In the Great Recession, Florida may have been the epi-

center in American financial fraud schemes. Bernie Madoff wintered at his

palatial home in Palm Beach, a city especial y hit hard by the New Yorker’s

Ponzi crimes. His misdeeds devastated Florida retirees, banks, country

clubs, and even charities.

The Great Recession has taken a tol . Floridians have had to learn a new

glossary to understand the malaise: underwater/upside down/toxic/sub-

prime mortgages, short sales, REITs (real estate investment trusts), robo-

signings, and flipping. Journalists have lacerated the state and its follies in

national publications. Provocative titles asked and exposed, “Is Florida the

Sunset State?,” “Is Florida Over?,” “Florida, Despair and Foreclosures,” and

“The Ponzi State.”17 In Cape Coral—the largest city on the Gulf coast south

of Tampa—tourists and speculators take foreclosure boat tours! Dateline

Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty: A Social History of Modern Florida · 525

Leigh Acres, Twin Lakes, Orange Park, and Dundee reveal layers of fraud,

tragedy, and hubris. The Great Recession has only worsened some alarm-

ing social and economic indicators. “We’re first in the nation in mortgage

fraud, second in foreclosures, last in high school graduation rates,” writes

Michael Grunwald in
Time
magazine. Grunwald concludes, “The question