The boomtown built on lies
Cape Coral, Fla., was built on a swamp by hucksters and could be wiped off the map by a powerful storm, said journalist Michael Grunwald. It also just happens to be the fastest-growing city in the U.S.
T HE ADS PROMISED paradise: “Legendary Lazy Living” in a “Waterfront Wonderland.” The brochures sold the Florida dream, “an enchanted City-in-theMaking (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 Sept. 14, 1960, lured by that sunny vision of affordable utopia. At the time, the vision was just about all there was. The City-inthe-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. The Rasos quickly discovered that in some ways, nature had not been so lavishly generous to Cape Coral. They arrived in town the same hour as Hurricane Donna, which was shredding southwest Florida with winds of 120 mph. They spent their first night in paradise in a house with no roof. “My mom was not a happy camper. She thought the storm was a sign we never should’ve come to Florida,” Raso Tate says. “But my dad was Mr. Positive. He believed in the dream.” Raso Tate’s true-believing dad soon became a top salesman for Cape Coral’s developer, Gulf American, peddling paradise on layaway, promoting one of the most notorious land scams in Florida’s scammy history. Gulf American unloaded tens of thousands of low-lying Cape Coral lots on dream seekers all over the world before the authorities cracked down on its frauds and deceptions. It passed off inaccessible mush as prime real estate and sold the same swampy lots to multiple buyers. Its hucksters spun a soggy floodplain between the Caloosahatchee River and the Gulf of Mexico as America’s middle-class boomtown of the future, and suckers bought it. 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 storm-water 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. As Florida cleans up after Hurricane Irma, which almost precisely followed Donna’s path through the Keys to Florida’s southwest coast, some Americans are asking what the hell 20 million people are doing in a flood-prone, storm-battered peninsula that was once the nation’s last unpopulated frontier. Federal taxpayers will spend billions of dollars on Irma relief, even though Irma did not turn out to be the “big one.” A slightly different track could have drowned cities like Miami or Tampa, boosting that price tag to hundreds of billions. Americans are also paying for a $16 billion project to resuscitate the dying Everglades, just part of the costs they will bear for the build-out of the Florida dream.
Cape Coral may be the best place to gauge the future of the dream—and to see whether Florida has any hope of overcoming its zany developmental, political, and environmental history—because Cape Coral is the ultimate microcosm of Florida. It’s literally a peninsula jutting off the peninsula, the least natural, worstplanned, craziest-growing piece of an unnatural, badly planned, crazy-growing state. Man has sculpted it into an almost comically artificial landscape, with a Seven Islands section featuring seven perfectly rectangular islands and an Eight Lakes neighborhood featuring eight perfectly square lakes. And while much of Florida now yo-yos between routine droughts and routine floods, Cape Coral’s fluctuations are particularly wild. This spring, the city faced a water shortage so dire that its fire department feared it couldn’t rely on its hydrants, yet this summer, the city endured a recordbreaking flood.
Much of Cape Coral faced a mandatory evacuation during Irma, because the forecast called for as much as 15 feet of storm surge blasting into its canals, and much of the city is just a few feet above sea level. The Red Cross opened only two shelters in town, because it doesn’t open shelters in vulnerable flood zones. As the storm approached, Raso Tate was texting with those three sisters who joined her in that back seat 57 years ago—and a fourth sister born a few months later, who is, of course, named Donna. “We were like: ‘Oh, no, it’s happening again, this could be the end of Cape Coral,’” Gloria says. But Irma swerved slightly, so while it hit Cape Coral