Word: florida
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...exposed a human pyramid scheme - an economy that relied on a thousand newcomers a day, too many of them construction workers, mortgage bankers, real estate agents and others whose livelihoods depended on importing a thousand more newcomers the next day. And the elaborate water-management scheme that made southern Florida habitable has been stretched beyond capacity, yo-yoing between brutal droughts and floods, converting the Everglades into a tinderbox and a sewer, ravaging the beaches, bays, lakes and reefs that made the region so alluring in the first place. "The dream is fading," says University of South Florida historian Gary...
Still, the winters really are great! And this doom-and-glooming might sound familiar. In 1981, TIME declared crime- and drug-plagued South Florida a "Paradise Lost." The region then embarked on an epic boom. Southeast Florida - including Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach - ballooned into the nation's seventh largest metro, while southwest Florida - Naples, Cape Coral, Fort Myers - became the fastest-growing metro. Last year 82.4 million visitors found their way to this lost paradise. And last month Governor Charlie Crist unveiled a $1.75 billion deal to buy the U.S. Sugar Corp. and its 187,000 acres...
...lifers like seventh-generation Floridian Allison DeFoor - lawyer, lobbyist, historian, Episcopal minister, environmental consultant and Republican operative - are disinclined to panic just yet. "Sure, it's the end of Florida as we know it," DeFoor quips. "It's always the end of Florida as we know...
...Florida's history is lush with volatility and flimflam. As Groucho Marx's real estate huckster warned in The Cocoanuts in 1929, "You can even get stucco! Oh, how you can get stucco." But eventually, the lies always seemed to come true, because there were always new dreamers from cold climates, and worthless swampland was just a drainage canal and a zoning variance away from becoming a golf-course subdivision...
...even boosters admit that Florida's Miracle-Gro has created many of its current problems. "We need steady growth, not crazy growth," Crist says. There's a sense that paradise has been ruined by awful traffic, overcrowded schools, overtapped aquifers and polluted beaches. The land of Disney dreams for the middle class is now a high-cost, low-wage state with Mickey Mouse schools and Goofy insurance rates, living beyond its environmental and economic means in harm's way. As peculiar as it sounds, this go-for-broke state of boundless possibilities - the land of Kimbo Slice, Miami Vice...