The Swamp Peddlers, Jason Vuic
The Swamp Peddlers, Jason Vuic
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The Swamp Peddlers
How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream

Author: Jason Vuic

Narrator: Mike Chamberlain

Unabridged: 9 hr 35 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/21/2021


Synopsis

Florida has long beckoned retirees seeking to spend their golden years in the sun, but, for many, the American dream of owning a home there was financially impossible. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called "installment land sales industry" appeared out of nowhere to hawk billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded homesite that would be waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build. The result created Cape Coral, Port St. Lucie, Deltona, Port Charlotte, Palm Coast, and Spring Hill, among many others—sprawling exurban communities with no downtowns and little industry but millions of residential lots.

As Jason Vuic recounts in this raucous history, these communities allowed generations of northerners to move to Florida cheaply, but at a price: high-pressure sales tactics begat fraud; poor urban planning begat sprawl; developers cleared forests, drained wetlands, and built thousands of miles of roads in grid-like subdivisions, which, fifty years later, played an inordinate role in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.

About Jason Vuic

Jason Vuic is the author of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History and The Sarajevo Olympics: A History of the 1984 Winter Games. A lifelong Buccaneer fan with degrees from Wake Forest University, the University of Richmond, and Indiana University, he grew up in Punta Gorda, Florida, and now lives in Fort Worth, Texas.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jono on June 28, 2021

This book should be read by all Floridians, and twice by all elected officials in the state. It documents the incredible story of how small number of men (abetted by a compliant Tallahassee) were able to create multiple "cities" (some over 100 square miles in size) with no downtowns, and, in many ca......more

Goodreads review by Mark on June 28, 2021

Florida historically grows where the railroad goes, in Henry Flaglers’s day, from St. Augustine, Palm Beach and Key West. Later, developers dredged and filled Miami. Meanwhile, Baron Collier and partners dreamed what a highway from Tampa to Naples and across the Glades to Miami might do. They battle......more

Goodreads review by Cayla on August 03, 2022

This book was a wealth of valuable information, and it did a great job of breaking it down. The information was overwhelming at times, but still digestible. I appreciate the research that went into this. A lot of the history in this book brings new meaning to the current state of Florida politically......more

Goodreads review by Mary Anne Westphal on August 20, 2021

A must read for anyone moving to Florida I've lived in Florida since 1968. Not in one of the swamp land fiascos fortunately but I remember Port St Lucie out in the middle of nowhere and Malabar and Palm Bay with lots under water. So much damage was done that the environment will never recover from. T......more