[From the Miami Herald, Apr. 19, 1964]

BOOM IS 800,000 ACRES OF SUBDIVIDED HOPE

Herald Staff Writer Haines Colbert has completed a 6-week tour of 32 Florida counties gathering information about land sales promotions. This is the first of a series of articles on the wide range of success and failure that he found and what it means to the State, residents, and investors.

(By Haines Colbert)

The second Florida land boom is more of an emotional experience than a business operation.

It's fascinating, inspiring, and depressing—and you need to drive a couple of thousand miles around the State to get any real idea of what it is all about.

The boom is a bright new city, swarming with workmen; you play golf there with a tobacco-chewing retired Navy captain, and he tells you he's never been busier or happier.

Down the road, the new boom has left a ghosttown. Riding along its wide, deteriorating avenues is an eerie experience. There are scattered homes, but not a person in sight. A quarter of a million dollars' worth of mercury vapor street lights are dark at night because no one will pay the $2,200 a month it costs to operate them.

A salesman in another part of the State reminds you that Miami Beach once was a swamp, too.

And C. W. (Pete) Chase, sales manager for the late Carl Fisher during the boom of the 1920's, replies:

"Yes, but we had a beautiful sand beach to go along with the swamp, and Mr. Fisher spent $6 million of his own money developing the property before he put the first lot on the market."

The boom has left its marks from the Keys up both coasts of Florida, through the hill country in the center of the State, clear up into the Panhandle. The highways in places seem almost to be walled with billboards promising that the gates of heaven are right around the next bend.

You see city sites dwarfing Miami in area-larger, as the salesmen point out, than Detrioit; larger than Manhattan Island.

They're part of the boom, but there is much more. The platbooks and tax records in the courthouses reveal the hopes of buyers and sellers of hundreds of thousands of additional acres.

"You don't even know anybody's doing anything with a lot of property until the deeds start coming in to be recorded," says a clerk. "All of a sudden, you find out that a big hunk of land has been sold off to people-most of them servicemen-in Germany and Japan and about every other country you can think of." Some of this property is visible from the road, but is unidentifiable as the site of a future metropolis because nothing has been done to it. Vast other tracts are far from any highway, inaccessible, frequently under water, in some cases not even surveyed.

Finally, if you really want to see the full face of the boom, you can go to the developers. Their names are listed with the Tampa headquarters of the Florida Installment Land Sales Board.

The board was created by the 1963 legislature and has jurisdiction over subdividers offering 50 or more parcels of real estate for sale on the installment plan in any one year. At last count, there were 196 such subdividers operating 230 subdivisions in the State.

Let them know you are interested and you will see the boom in full, flaming color-with words to match. You'll see spectacular pictures of missiles being launched at Cape Kennedy, factories, girls, fish, the homes of the rich.

No one will claim any of this is on the property he is offering you, but it all seems somehow to be tied up in the package which becomes yours for $10, $5, or even $1 down.

Lots all over the State will be set aside for you with the warning that the offer is good only for a matter of hours or days because a price increase is imminent and a multitude of shrewd investors will be trying to beat you to the ground floor.

Some of this material carries a printing date of 1960 or 1961, but it still sounds urgent.

The installment board is in the process of gathering detailed information on all of the subdivisions. When its questionnaires are returned by the subdividers, the board will know precisely what is being offered and the subdividers will be required to furnish the same information to customers.

Until the records are complete, it is possible only to make a good guess at how much land is for sale, is being bought on monthly installments, or has been paid out. Many of the companies state the acreage of subdivisions in their advertisements and the others are dealing in at least the 50 parcels or they wouldn't be listed with the board.

Adding the known figures to the minimum amount of land which the nonreporters must have, you find that the subdividers are dealing in at least 800,000

acres.

This doesn't include the spreading suburbs of the cities. It's apart from the established communities-800,000 acres of what recently was, or is, raw, undeveloped land.

An acre is good for about three homesites. Some subdividers make the lots a little larger, others a little smaller, but three is average.

The 800,000 acres, then, would become 2,400,000 homesites if all of them were broken down and developed. Subdividers immediately retort that they're not splitting up all of the property-that much of it is being sold in blocks of 22, 5, or 10 acres.

This is true, but it's also true that the buyers of the tracts are assured they can become little subdividers on their own, and one of the larger sellers furnishes them with a booklet illustrating exactly how to get 16 homesites, complete with road and utility easements, out of a 5-acre tract.

So it is reasonable to say that the subdividers are talking in terms of more than 2 million homesites, or of space for at least 5 million people-about the equivalent of the whole population of Florida.

The subdivider, who is questioned about where all the people are going to come from, usually goes into statistics on the growing number of retired persons in the United States and the percentage of them likely to settle here.

He seldom mentions, though, that the subdivisions are in direct competition not only with one another but also with Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, St. Petersburg, and all the other established communities.

Roscoe Jones, director of the Dade Planning Department, estimates that 74.2 percent of the population of Florida was living in or around established communities in 1960, and that the figure will rise to 77 percent in 1970 and 80 percent in 1980.

Taking 75 percent as a round figure, it would be necessary on that basis to add 20 million people to Florida's population in order to give the cities their share and fill the subdivisions.

While they may not agree with Jones' figures, most subdividers will concede that the majority of the State's new inhabitants do find homes in cities.

To Ralph Smathers, executive director of the Better Business Bureau of Greater Miami, this has no bearing on the ultimate course of the boom. "I'm bullish about all Florida real estate," says Smathers, "but I'm thinking in terms of a long-range investment-perhaps 30 years in some areas." Some of the developers take a shorter and colder view.

"We've come to the time," says Frank Mackle of the building Mackle Brothers, "when the builders in this business will be separated from the perfume salesmen. There's plenty of opportunity for the good developer. I think we're going to lose some of the others."

BEHIND THE BOOM-VACANT DREAMS

Florida is speckled with development dreams that have faded in washed-out beaches and vacant community halls. Here Haines Colbert describes some of them in this third article in a series which takes a sharp look at the State's new land boom.

(By Haines Colbert)

Developers of Indian Lake Estates advertised they spent more than $5 million on the physical facilities of "Florida's finest golf and country club community."

Two million dollars came from the pension fund of Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters Union.

But Indian Lake Estates-on the shore of Lake We-oh-ya-Kapka 18 miles southeast of Lake Wales-is one of the new Florida boom communities that didn't make the grade.

It's easy enough to see where the money went.

The main avenues of Indian Lake Estates look like the midtown portion of Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, only they extend for 20 miles. The lanes are divided by 30-foot strips planted with hundreds of fully developed palm trees. A T-shaped fishing pier reaches 1,100 feet out into the lake. There's a massive two-story country club with championship 18-hole and par-three golf

courses.

Everywhere, along the avenues and fishing pier and around the smaller golf course, the driving range and the shuffleboard courts, are the newestand most expensive-thing in mercury vapor lights.

A 300,000-gallon water tank towers over a lone, weatherbeaten wall rising out of the weeds of what was to have been the site of a $150,000 shopping plaza.