Florida

Florida, the nation’s fourth largest state (and closing in on No. 3, New York), is a kind of nation-state, historically Southern, demographically Northeastern and Midwestern, and culturally Latin American. It is economically vibrant but subject to sudden contractions, as in the mid-1920s, the mid-1970s and the late 2000s. It has the nation’s largest percentage of elderly citizens, but its exotic past reaches back to Ponce de Leon’s quest for the Fountain of Youth. It is the only Atlantic Coast state that was not part of the colonial United States. Through the exertions of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, then political allies but later bitter political enemies, it was acquired from Spain in 1819. Starting off as a forgotten swamp, Florida has emerged as almost an empire of its own, a prototype in many ways of America’s future, with an international flavor and sometimes almost with its own foreign policy. Within the lifespan of the typical octogenarian, it went from 1.5 million people to 18 million. Pivotal was the advent of air conditioning. In 1950, only 20% of Florida houses had it; in 2000, 95% of them did. For many years, Florida was the place millions of retirees looked forward to: sunny, year-round warmth after years of gray skies over factories and office buildings.

Then in the 1980s and 1990s, the percentage of children and young couples as a share of Florida’s population grew rapidly as people migrated from the South, from various points north and from Latin America. They were lured by jobs and opportunities in communities that hadn’t existed a generation earlier. Some 17% of Florida’s population today is over age 65, more than the national average of 13%, but not extraordinarily more. The state’s percentage of children under age18 is 22%, not much below the national average of 25%. For refugees from Cuba and Haiti and for immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, Florida has been a land of freedom and security from authoritarian regimes and totalitarian police states. For Americans and foreigners of all kinds—some 80 million of them—Florida is the place to visit, with lively attractions, year-round swimming, and accommodations to suit most pocketbooks. Yet all is not sunny. Crime is down, but still a threat. An economy that sizzled until 2007 was inordinately affected by the recession, which had been fueled by a crisis in the mortgage market and so hit areas of brisk building particularly hard.

Florida is a creation not of America’s elite—though a few millionaires, such as Henry Flagler and Marcus Plant, pioneered tourism there—but a place for which ordinary people have voted with their feet. It has been continually replenished with people from out of state, two-thirds of them from the United States, one-third from foreign countries. Miami has long been the economic and commercial capital of Latin America, as well as a mecca for its political exiles. You can fly nonstop from Miami to just about anyplace in Latin America, both English and Spanish are commonly understood, and it has been one place where many Latinos could be sure their money and their persons were safe from government takeover. Recent ructions in their countries have brought thousands of Venezuelans, Bolivians, and Ecuadorans, some affluent and some struggling, to south Florida. Large number of Puerto Ricans have been moving to central Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor, and Mexicans to the Tampa Bay area; as a result, Cubans now account for only about a third of Florida’s Hispanics.

For almost two decades, Florida had one of America’s most buoyant economies, though its economy often seems a mystery to outsiders. That economy is based heavily on small business—98% of businesses have fewer than 100 employees, and in the 1990s Florida ranked No. 1 in small-business starts. There is also a high-tech sector and a substantial amount of international merchandise, which increased from $24 billion in 1987 to $81 billion in 2004. For years, two of the leading sectors of the state’s economy were construction and real estate. They prosper and grow during booms but are subject to sudden busts, such as the Miami land boom that ended abruptly when a hurricane struck in 1926. Something like that seems to have happened in 2007. Speculators had been buying up condos in Miami and Cape Coral, Orlando and Port St. Lucie, and then suddenly prices started to fall, even as property taxes and insurance premiums rose. Housing values plummeted by half in some speculator-heavy precincts and by significant amounts just about everywhere. The state’s population continued to grow from 2007 to 2008, but at a much slower pace than it did mid-decade. A flood of foreclosures followed, and Florida became one of the “sand states”—the others are Nevada, Arizona and California—which have the nation’s highest foreclosure rates by far, accounting for half of all foreclosures in 2007 and 2008. Local tax receipts, heavily dependent on property values and the construction industry, sagged. Unemployment rose from 5.5% in May 2008 to 8.1% in January 2009. Retirees and workers started leaving for Georgia, the Carolinas and elsewhere; in 2007 and 2008 Florida had a net domestic outmigration of 9,000 people, although the state’s population still increased by 127,000.

All this was happening in a state with a fragile civil society. Florida can be disorderly and chaotic in the best of times. Most people do not have deep roots in the state—most communities sprang into existence within living memory—and if Florida gives people more freedom and options than elsewhere, it also gives them more disruption and crime than they surely anticipated. Its largest urban focus, Miami, is geographically off to one corner and culturally uniquely Cuban. The rest of the Gold Coast, Broward and Palm Beach counties, with one-sixth of Florida’s population, is also atypical, with a population drawn heavily from New York and other Northeastern cities, plus non-Latino migrants from Miami-Dade and large numbers of Jews and retirees. Central Florida—the I-4 corridor from Tampa-St. Petersburg through citrus and tourist country and Orlando—is mostly family, not retiree, country. It thrives on high-tech industries as well as tourism, and is a year-round rather than seasonal megalopolis of 4.8 million people. Most newcomers are from the United States, not from abroad. There is also the Gulf Coast, the affluent and burgeoning communities south of Tampa Bay and the more modest retirement counties to the north. The western Panhandle, the so-called Redneck Riviera around Pensacola and Panama City, is culturally very Southern. State government is headquartered in Tallahassee, chosen because it was midway between the two population centers of Jacksonville and Pensacola at a time when almost no one lived in the Florida peninsula.

Politically, this all adds up to a state that is closely divided between the parties and politically volatile. The trend in Florida politics since the 1990s has been toward the Republicans, who captured the state House in 1994, the state Senate in 1996, and the governorship in 1998 and now hold all the statewide offices and have big majorities in the Legislature: 26-14 in the Senate, 76-44 in the House. They have been helped by term limits and redistricting, which Republicans influenced in 1992 and controlled in 2002: African-American and Jewish areas are concentrated in a few districts. But Democrats have held their own in federal races. Republican George H. W. Bush carried the state 61%-39% in 1988, but Democrat Bill Clinton lost the state by only 41%-39% in 1992 and carried it 48%-42% in 1996. Four years later, Democrat Al Gore lost the state by the excruciating margin of 48.85%-48.84%, determined after the epic 36-day multi-court contest that decided the 2000 presidential election. In 2008, Democrat Barack Obama undertook a massive organizational effort in Florida and won with 51% to Republican John McCain’s 48%. In recent years, drops in the crime rates and welfare rolls deprived Republicans of issues in metropolitan areas in Central Florida and on the Gold Coast. Cultural issues like abortion rights and gun control favored Democrats, and the increasing Jewish population in Broward and Palm Beach counties moved the Gold Coast even more toward Democrats. In the I-4 corridor, what had been a big Republican margin for Bush in 1988 was transformed to a Clinton margin in 1996 and a standoff in 2000. The biggest drop in the Republican percentage in any county in Florida between 1988 and 2000 was in fast-growing Osceola County, which contains part of Disney World and the Disney-sponsored “new town” of Celebration. In the 1980s, Disney World was still an epitome of traditional conservative values; by 2000, Disney was hosting Gay Day.

In state politics, Republicans have been dominant, thanks in large part to the wide appeal of two quite different governors, Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist. After initially losing a bid for governor to Lawton Chiles, Bush came back in 1998 to win 55%-45% and proceeded to build a record that made him arguably one of the best governors of his time. Over the opposition of the teachers’ unions, he improved the rigor and accountability of the schools and provided alternatives for those in schools that were failing. He cut taxes, he overturned, to great protest, racial quotas and preferences, and he involved local governments and the private sector in helping accommodate the state’s rapid growth with new infrastructure. He prepared meticulously for the natural disasters that are part of Florida’s natural heritage. In 2002 Democrats targeted Bush for defeat, but he was re-elected 56%-43%. In 2006, the Republican nominee for governor was Attorney General Charlie Crist, known as tough on law enforcement but less conservative on other issues than Jeb Bush. He defeated Democratic Rep. Jim Davis, from the I-4 corridor, 52%-45%, losing the Gold Coast 59%-40% but winning the I-4 corridor 54%-43% and the rest of the state 59%-38%. Crist put into place an innovative insurance program, essentially making state government the insurer of last resort against hurricane damage. He also advanced the idea of buying out the U.S. Sugar Corporation in order to restore the Everglades.

Crist’s efforts on the Everglades illustrate how important the environment is as an issue in Florida these days, but one that may not cut in a predictably partisan way. For years, the Everglades were seen as a nuisance, a bar to development. The Army Corps of Engineers started building a dike across Lake Okeechobee in 1930 and for nearly 50 years, worked to straighten the Kissimmee River and to build dikes and channels to reclaim land for farming. But with the 1947 publication of The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who died in 1998 at 108, Floridians began to appreciate the Everglades, which is essentially a flow of water south, from the Kissimmee River near Disney World, through Lake Okeechobee down to Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Jeb Bush worked with national politicians of both parties on a giant, multiyear project to reverse the projects of the past and restore the Everglades. One problem was that two well-connected sugar companies—U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals—produced cane sugar in critical lands south of the lake. In 2007, members of the South Florida Water Management District, all but one appointed by Gov. Crist, voted to bar U.S. Sugar from back-pumping polluted runoff into the lake, and the company sent two prominent lobbyists to Crist to protest. He responded by offering to buy the company out. In June 2008, he announced his plan to buy U.S. Sugar for $1.75 billion and eventually take its 187,000 acres out of production and let water from Lake Okeechobee flow through them, restoring the old flow pattern of the Everglades. The water management district approved the plan in December 2008, though negotiations continued over the purchase price, and some questioned whether the state could afford the purchase. In fact, the deal was significantly scaled back in April 2009, with the state slated to buy 72,500 acres for $533 million and getting a 10-year option to purchase the remaining land.