As Hurricane Ian batters the US, this story from 2017 makes for
a staggering read. Its author, Michael Grunwald, visits Cape Coral,
Florida – at that point the country’s fastest-growing city, despite it
being little more than a swamp and sitting just a few feet above sea
level.
Predictably, the city has its origins in what was basically a real
estate scam:
“Gulf American unloaded tens of thousands of low-lying Cape Coral lots
on dreamseekers all over the world before the authorities cracked down
on its frauds and deceptions. It passed off inaccessible mush as prime
real estate, sold the same swampy lots to multiple buyers, and used
listening devices to spy on its customers. Its hucksters spun a soggy
floodplain between the Caloosahatchee River and the Gulf of Mexico as
America’s middle-class boomtown of the future, and suckers bought it.”
But, bizarrely, it somehow worked, with disastrous long-term
consequences:
“The thing is, the hucksters were right, and so were the suckers. Cape
Coral is now the largest city in America’s fastest-growing
metropolitan area. Its population has soared from fewer than 200 when
the Rasos arrived to 180,000 today. Its low-lying swamps have been
drained, thanks to an astonishing 400 miles of canals – the most of
any city on earth – that serve not only as the city’s stormwater
management system but also its defining real estate amenity. Those
ditches were an ecological disaster, ravaging wetlands, estuaries and
aquifers. Cape Coral was a planning disaster, too, designed without
water or sewer pipes, shops or offices, or almost anything but
pre-platted residential lots. But people flocked here anyway. The
title of a memoir by a Gulf American secretary captured the essence of
Cape Coral: Lies That Came True.”
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