Mark Power Blog

After Cudjoe Key I ended up in the real Florida, Lehigh Acres, a vast exurb of Fort Myers ( twice the size of Manhattan), recently described as the “Ground Zero” of foreclosures.

 

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Unfinished construction, Lehigh Acres, Fl.

 

Both the New Yorker and the New York Times have written recent articles on Lehigh Acres, and even President Obama made a lightning visit to Fort Myers last month to see what was going on. 

Abandoned foreclosure, Lehigh Acres, Fl

 

What is going on is the American Dream turned inside out. Most of the houses, built between 2004 and 2006, at the height of the housing boom, are one story concrete block-and-stucco structures, sitting low on the ground.  I imagine they would withstand a hurricane pretty well  but evidently the developers weren’t prepared for the economic hurricane, a high wind  tearing silently through the mostly deserted streets.

 

 

Lehigh Acre streets, flat and as long as airport runways, are laid out in grids as precise as those in video games. Some are paved and some are not. Flood control canals hide behind some streets, some filled with water; most dry as a bone.

 

Floods are a long way from people’s minds these days.  If Key West was a green that hurt the eyes, Lehigh Acres is a parched  brown that hurts the spirit. The palms droop despairingly, the overgrown Florida lawns are broken up by fire ant nests, and for sale signs hang unread everywhere. 

 

 

The unbelievable fact is that some houses in Lehigh acres have lost  as much as 200% of their value.  Many are “underwater” foreclosures, so called because the  houses are abandoned because they are worthless, not because people can’t keep up the payments. And once they walk away, in many cases leaving even their possessions behind, some dream of schemes of how to buy another house.

Real estate prices  in Lehigh Aacres are probably lower than their equivalents were during the depression of the 30s. Twenty-five thousand can get you a two bedroom house with two baths and fifty thousand will get you a pretty good three bedroom with a lanai and a pool, lanais being Florida speak for enclosed patios. 

 

The optimism of yesterday

 

The reality of today ( from a real estate website)

 

But if you yield to that enticement above you’d have to live with the silence. It’s the absence of  cars that make it so quiet.  People didn’t really walk away, they drove away, leaving behind garages filled with discarded appliances.

It’s also the absence of children; you see discarded  toys in the backyards that more resemble unkempt cemeteries.

 

 

Another oddity in Lehigh Acres is that there are no fences to delineate properties; one  overgrown lot segues into another. On every block you see houses abandoned in mid-construction or sitting on half-graded lots.  But many abandoned houses look new; you have to look carefully to see the signs of neglect: the empty driveways, the ripped apart cages in which air conditioner units once sat, the satellite dishes lying on the ground, the abandoned pools turning green as algae flourishes.

Abandoned pool and lanai

 

Back in Washington life seems as unreal as it did in the Keys. Our aging suburb ( as it usually described)  doesn’t look any different although the houses are said to have lost about 4% of their value. 

Silver Spring, Md

 

 People around here are hunkering down, not walking away … yet. The Federal Government, our local rooster industry, lurches along, flinging  heaps of money into the air, and we are told that in another  year or two the sun will rise again. Called “rooster” because our government reminds me of a practice in some Asian funerals: when a deceased person is being carried to the grave, a rooster is perched atop the remains: if the corpse stirs, the rooster is supposed to crow…    

 And although we returned home  to find a blizzard whistling about our ears, we notice the snowdrops are poking their heads above the ground. Soon it will be Spring. We’ll get out our Florida T shirts and shorts and make a resolve to stop reading the New York Times. It will be  the year of the Rooster ( not to mention the Ostrich) until that hurricane begins to steal down our streets.