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Florida Returns To The Spotlight A Bit Shabbier

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By STEVE OTTO

sotto@tampatrib.com

Published: February 11, 2009

Of course Barack Obama came to Florida this week. This is ground zero. Too bad he didn't show up during the Democratic primaries a year ago. Don't you wonder what he would have said then?

But that was then. That was when Floridians were hoping to have a voice in who would become president.

That was also an eternity ago. That was back when your house was still worth more than your mortgage and when even dreams such as the Trump Tower were still part of the final days of the condo boom.

In those days - a year ago - the part of Florida that generated interest for politicians was that near-mythical chunk of real estate known as the I-4 corridor. This was that microcosm of America. If you understood the people of the I-4 corridor, then you understood the American voter.

The I-4 corridor was also Florida's future, a Silicon Valley of high-tech industries that would stretch from the Gulf to the Atlantic, fueled by academic institutions such as the directional University of South Florida and University of Central Florida.

It's a 130-mile stretch that takes in the Tampa Bay region, Lakeland, Orlando and Daytona. In some ways it's a concrete belt that divides the more rural north and the more urban southern parts of the state.

There were rumbles of economic woe somewhere down the line a year ago, but for the most part we were more concerned with sealing our borders and figuring out how to gracefully pull out of the Middle East mess. A year later and the focus is still on Florida, but the interest is now along the Gulf Coast, from Tampa south to Fort Myers.

A Swampy Ground Zero
Florida has become ground zero in the housing collapse, with entire neighborhoods feeling the effects of foreclosure and a philosophy of build it and they will come.

Nowhere is that more evident than in this chunk of Florida's west coast. This is not the tourist-based Florida or the farms and ranches of the north. This is a Florida settled largely by Midwesterners, and there is that feel of neighborhoods and small towns with a Southern twist.

But it is still Florida, where speculators and developers drained swamps and where politicians to this day ignore responsible growth, believing that "responsible" is somehow anti-growth.

My old friend and former columnist Charlie Robins talks about his stint as a real estate editor. He remembers going on a bus tour of a new development deep in South Florida that had the name "Hills" attached to it.

"The bus driver turned into the development and put the bus into another gear as if he were about to climb a mountain. The ground was completely flat."

Complicity Of Easy Money

So when Obama came to Florida, about the only difference was that this time it was not just the developers who were complicit in the greed and easy money that contributed to the housing crisis.

It's a crisis of our own making and one that is going to take more than a government to bail out.

You don't have to understand economic policy to know that the real long-term solutions are going to require sacrifice, hard work and a return to an ethic that our parents and grandparents probably understood better than we do.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, for more of Steve Otto's musings.

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