Exiles In Eden: Life Among The Ruins of Florida's Great Recession

Paul Reyes, “Exiles In Eden: Life Among The Ruins Of Florida’s Great Recession”, Henry Holt, 2010, 259 pp

A tour of the home foreclosure crisis in Florida as the author accompanies his father’s company that “trashes out”—enters and empties—foreclosed homes.  This book is written from the perspective of the displaced rather than the more familiar approach which details the hardships the bankers inflicted on themselves.  In any event, the book furthered my continuing education on my new home: Florida.

The author is the former editor at large of The Oxford American

My Notes:

Pg. 44:  In 1881, a Philadelphia sawmaker named Hamilton Disston purchased four million acres of Florida (at twenty-five cents an acre) from a debt-strapped state on the verge of bankruptcy, promising to drain it.  He cut a deal with the rail magnate Henry Plant and Standard Oil co-founder Henry Flagler to develop land along railroad routes reaching to Tampa and Key West.  Modern Florida’s painful emergence began with these three men and the drainage effort they inaugurated.  Developers began to channel billions of gallons of water eastward and westward from Lake Okeechobee, to help dry the lands to the south and begin taming the Everglades. 

Pg. 47:  Beginning with the economic prosperity that followed WWII, Florida’s population doubled in twenty years, from 3 million to 6 million, then nearly doubled again over the next twenty. 

Pg. 203:  In 1969 eighty-two planes were hijacked in the US, a good number of them landing in Havana.  So it became a problem to consider that year when flying to Florida.

Pg. 214:  In 1954 the development that later became known as Leigh Acres began with the carving up of eighteen thousand acres of defunct cattle ranch into half-acre lots.  The ideal from the beginning was to sell the lots, nothing more.  No forethought was given to the possibility that someone might actually want to live there, no consideration given to streets or schools or sewers.  The absurdity of the premise, that you could sell a worthless patch of land to people far away and expect them never to show up, was part of the logic of Florida real estate in the early 1950s.  In the land boom of the 1920s, at least the suckers bothered to show up. 

Recommends two books:

Gary Mormino’s Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida, C2005

Michael Grunwald’s The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, C2006