Category: default || By jt3y

FT. MYERS, Fla., June 7 --- They say good fences make good neighbors. Based on what I'm seeing, Florida's Gulf Coast must have a lot of great neighbors. I've never seen so much stockade fencing in my life. It seems like every other neighborhood is a gated community, and some of them are quite large --- one I visited this morning had 3,500 residents.

Yet not all of these gated communities are upscale. I've seen several that were primarily composed of mobile homes ... excuse me, manufactured houses. Some of the manufactured houses, in fact, are very nice, and almost indistinguishable from stick-built houses. They ought to be: Some of them are selling for $150,000.

You heard that right: Glorified trailers are running about 150 grand. Actual permanent homes are going for considerably more than $150,000, and I'm talking about little houses --- 1950s-style ranches that would fit in perfectly in Port Vue, but on tiny postage-stamp lots instead of the quarter-acres in Westwood Hills. Even the very expensive upscale houses down here are on tiny lots, in fact, and because so many of them are built on sandy soil, the lawns are
decidedly scruffy. It's kind of odd to see these $400,000 faux rancheros on little ugly weedy lawns. It's as if the builder of one of those Hempfield Township McMansions accidentally erected them in Braddock.

(Well, OK, so you don't see so many palm trees in Braddock. Also, for $400,000 you could own Braddock, and have change left over to buy Chalfant. But I digress.)

By the way, paying $400,000 for a house in the Ft. Myers-Naples corridor doesn't get you anywhere near a shoreline. But for $700,000, you can get a house on one of the local lakes, according to the local Re/Max office. It's one of what they're calling "patio" houses --- basically a flat concrete slab with a two-bedroom stucco ranch house and a two-car garage. In most cases, you're actually sharing a wall with the neighbor's house, so for three-quarters of a million dollars, you're buying half of a duplex that would set you back maybe $70,000 in Versailles Borough.

That's for a lakefront house. If you want oceanfront property, you're looking at upwards of $1 million.

Back to the gated communities. Why so many? I'm not sure, because I don't know who they're trying to keep out. People from the other gated communities? Are there rivalries? Maybe 80-year-old retired insurance salesmen from Villa Real get together and rumble against the 80-year-old retired schoolteachers from Oceanbreeze Estates. Then they drag race their Larks and Hoverrounds up and down the Tamiami Trail.

My great-aunt has lived in the Ft. Myers area for 10 years, and I stopped in to visit with her. At lunch, talk turned to the new construction that literally is going on at every intersection. I told her I was amazed to see that a new housing development was being erected on what looked like to my ignorant eyes nothing but sand.

According to her, though, there was a minor scandal in Ft. Myers a few years ago when the purchasers of a bunch of $250,000 houses found their retirement homes suddenly shifting and cracking. It turns out that the foundations which were supposed to have been shored up were, in fact, built on nothing but sand. The houses had to be torn down and rebuilt, she says.

"What do people do for work around here?" I asked.

"Mostly, they're retired," she said. The deed covenant in her community requires all residents to be at least 55. If a resident dies, she says, and their spouse remarries, they have to remarry someone at least 35, or move from the plan. Love is blind, but attorneys who write deeds are not, I guess.

In any event, she said, the biggest sector of the local labor market is in service industries --- restaurant workers, retail clerks, housekeepers.

"How can they afford to buy a house for $150,000?" I asked.

"They can't," she said. "They live in old shacks."

Indeed, after we parted I took a ride around Ft. Myers, neighboring Bonita Springs, and Naples. You don't have to look very far beyond the glitzy new shops and strip malls along U.S. 41 to find tarpaper shacks and ancient (or at least ancient-looking) aluminum mobile homes along unpaved roads.

Who's working the jobs? My aunt has an answer for that, too (admittedly unverified, though she's well-read and politically active). In the last 10 years, the number of illegal immigrants in Florida has doubled, she says. That goes a long way toward explaining why so many of the housing developments have fences around them, and guards at the gates.

I'm not going anywhere near Miami, where the clashes between Anglos and Cubans are the stuff that presidential campaigns are made of. Nevertheless, I suspect there's ethnic tension to spare in central Florida. Driving on U.S. 27 south of Orlando, I saw several businesses --- motels, garages, restaurants --- with signs that said "Owned and Operated By Americans."

There's nothing like appealing to someone's racism as a way to distinguish yourself from your competitors, I suppose. Of course, the Mon-Yough area's record of ethnic tolerance doesn't exactly make it a shining beacon of hope for humanity, either, and the reason that Western Pennsylvania doesn't have any problem with immigrants is mainly because nobody is emigrating to it.

But that's an issue for another time.