Boston. com has an interesting article on the recent collapse of the Florida housing market. This is a series of aerial photos showing completed and unfinished subdivisions all over florida. But mainly from in and around Lee County, my home and employer. Each pic has a link to google maps and I highly recommend go there and zooming out a little to see the scale of the problem.
I don’t know what’s more depressing and alarming, the undeveloped subdivisions or the hive-like single family residential areas.
I think the interesting thing is that this does not appear to be particularly new for Florida. At least one of those unfinished developments was from the sixties.
From 01’-02’ I lived in an apartment in Bonita Springs directly on Tamiami Trail. I worked in Ft.Myers and my fiancee in Naples.
Even in the one year I couldn’t comprehend the development explosion going on around me. Who the hell was going to be filling all these houses? Is everyone in the US retiring to Lee county? Where are the jobs? Retail infrastructure for everyone? The roadway system was horrible. A north-south Tamiami Trail artery and a further inland north-south I-75 artery? For all this development? No way.
I haven’t been back there in 8 years. I can’t imagine how densely packed that place is now.
I first saw Fort Myers in 1965; most of the farm land in Lee county was planted in gladiolas and citrus groves, with some row crops. Back then Lee county was the “Gladiola Capital of the United States.” Cape Coral was just beginning to be developed and Lehigh Acres was a wasteland full of roads and empty lots.
More recently, I had occasion to visit Cape Coral fairly often; the development was sickening.
My inlaws live on the edge of a retirement community in Ocala. The property abutting theirs was a dairy farm that was sold for a development. They cleared it, put in roads, built a couple of houses, then the bubble exploded. I think there’s a community center and a few houses, and a whole lot of weeds.
The inlaws want to sell, but between the market and the fact that in a retirement community, people are always dying, leaving houses to sell, they’re kinda stuck.
Many, many times during the boom a new development would be proposed for out in the rural areas and my coworkers and I would be saying that there was no need for more housing in this county. And every time, the objection was simply ignored as beneath notice.
People have finally begun to understand the idea of a housing glut. Let’s hope it means they’ll listen to me a little more when I talk about suburban sprawl.
I was looking at some of the houses in Picture 17. There would be a loop at the end of a road with one house sticking out like the last remaining petal on a denuded daisy. Yet in Street View, I could see the recycle and garbage bins sitting by the curb. Someone has to provide municipal services to all these places. Did the municipalities never think, “Hey! Who’s going to pay for all these things while the subdivision is filling up? And what if it doesn’t fill up? And what do we do now that it hasn’t filled up?” It would make sense to move everyone into a couple of the subdivisions close to the main roads, and only serve those.
And where are the stores? Libraries? Post offices? Offices? Gas stations, even? Jobs? All the things that a community needs?
Well, someone must still own the property (presumably the developer, or whatever bank got the development when the developer folded), so someone must be paying the property tax which I assume would cover the expenses of delivering services to the houses that are occupied.
Sunspace, you’re idea of bringing common sense considerations to development decisions is quite novel.
The strain on urban services and infrastructure installation and maintenance is one of the big reasons for fighting suburban sprawl.
One way in which the basic infrastructure is funded is through Uniform Community Development Districts. Traditionally, a developer pays to put in the water, sewer, roads and such himself and adds that cost to the price of the home. But with a UCDD, the developer creates a legal entity that pays for all this stuff by levying an assessment on the home buyers. Sounds like a good idea, making folks pay for the water and sewer that they use. But the process goes wrong in that the developer knows that the UCDD is picking up the tab and he will not bear the final cost of the construction costs. Therefore, he has no incentive to be frugal seeking out loans. The banks know this too and will charge higher interest rates. So the final cost is passed on to the homebuyers in the form of an annual assessment that might be in the thousands of dollars. And this is on top of the mortgage and ad valorum property taxes. The developer doesn’t really lower the price of the house, charging the “Market rate” which is based on the assuption of him paying for the utility installation himself. So he gets a little more profit. The banks get to charge a higher interest rate. The poor homeowner is stuck footing the bill.
Now the UCDDs are in trouble. With no one buying the homes, the UCDDs have no one to foot the installation costs and the banks are foreclosing on those loans too. And I have little sympathy for the developers or banks who wrecked a sound concept to line their own pockets just a little more.
Right. But these platted communities were sleeping giants just waiting around to create trouble. And boy did they. Since many of them were platted so long ago, they’re grandfathered past many of our development regulations. And when the land boom ignited, we had huge (Like, 97 square miles in Lehigh Acres alone) areas of nothing but single family lots waiting to be built on. And so an area that had 5,000 lots and one house suddenly had 5,000 lots and 120 houses. But still only that 1 occupied house.
I don’t understand Photo 8 There must be over 200 houses on the island in the man-made lake, with their only egress being a two lane bridge?? Great for hurricanes.
And another 300 houses on the perimeter of the lake with only another two lane bridge to get to the main road.
A lot of these lakeside subdivisions are former mines. Or the lake is dug in order to provide fill to build upon. It’s often cheaper to buy “worthless swampland” and build it up than to get prime upland.
Picture 8 is actually a somewhat healthy lake in that it has a sinuous shoreline which provides better habitat for lake species. Many early mine-based lakes are simply square or rectangular and have steep dropoffs close to the edge instead of nice gentle slopes to harbor lake dwelling species.
That particular development is in Collier Co. so I don’t know their access regulations. In Lee Co. we require at least two access points for developments. But this can be waived if it’s a “Hardship to the Land.” Which developers always argue it is.
My folks retired to Cape Coral almost 2 years ago. There’s still a bit of construction out there, both commercial & residential. Every time I go down there, there’s a new house or two in my parents’ subdivision – Dad’s told me that the subdivision accounts for a significant percentage of all residential construction in Cape Coral these days. Why there’s any at all mystifies me – the subdivision has a number of vacant homes, some foreclosures, some not.