The Boomtown That Shouldn't Exist

[mahatmakanejeeves]

November/December 2017? So soon?

Retweeted by David Fahrenthold: https://twitter.com/fahrenthold

the fastest growing city in america is 100 percent sure to get wiped out by a natural disaster

Link to tweet

The Boomtown That Shouldn’t Exist

Cape Coral, Florida, was built on total lies. One big storm could wipe it off the map. Oh, and it’s also the fastest-growing city in the United States.

By MICHAEL GRUNWALD November/December 2017

CAPE CORAL, Florida — The ads promised paradise, “Legendary Lazy Living” in a “Waterfront Wonderland.” The brochures sold the Florida dream, “an enchanted City-in-the-Making (average temperature: 71.2 degrees)” without winter, worries or state income taxes. Cape Coral was America’s land of tomorrow, just $20 down and $20 a month for a quarter-acre slice of heaven: “Breathtaking, isn’t it? How could it be otherwise when Nature was so lavishly generous to begin with?”

The Raso family moved from Pittsburgh to Cape Coral on September 14, 1960, lured by that sunny vision of affordable utopia. At the time, the vision was just about all there was. The City-in-the-Making was still mostly uninhabitable swampland, with just a few dozen homes along a few mosquito-swarmed dirt roads. “We were pioneers in a station wagon instead of a covered wagon,” recalls Gloria Raso Tate, who was 9 years old when she piled into the back seat with her three sisters and a mutt named Peppy.
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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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Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

[mountain grammy]

1. Long read, but worth it..

I kind of wanted to see the Keys again in my lifetime, but don't care anymore. The guy who scraped his leg on the dock and contracted flesh eating bacteria from the water was enough for me. It's a giant sewer.

[progressoid]

2. "seniors who dont care much about schools or other servicesand dont like taxes."

Then no FEMA for them after the next hurricane. These anti-government, "self-sufficient" republicans can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.