HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
TWILIGHT IN THE SUNSHINE STATE
scrubby brush and pine trees
line one side of the road. On the
other a white house with a broken
mailbox lying in the driveway sits
empty and abandoned.
I roll down the windows and
turn off the engine. Swampy air
creeps into the car. It is completely quiet; all the scene needs is
tumbleweeds. Finally, 20 minutes
later, a lone pickup truck crosses
through a distant intersection.
Welcome to Lehigh Acres, and
ground zero of the foreclosure crisis. Home sale prices in this huge
but sparsely populated neighborhood fell to $63,000 in the spring
of 2012 from a median peak of
$208,000 in 2007. One of every
172 homes received a foreclosure
notice in May, according to RealtyTrac. This sounds preposterous –
not because the rate is four times
that of the national average, but
because it is hard to imagine that
anyone is left after the purge that
swept through here over the past
five years. This is the anti-planned
development: 100,000 lots in a
nowhere exurb traded like playing cards and lofted ever higher in
price until the scheme collapsed.
“The real estate industrial complex drove Florida’s economy,”
says Roy Oppenheim, a housing
lawyer at a Ft. Lauderdale firm.
“We did an analysis. If you count
the builders, bankers, appraiser,
brokers and laborers whose businesses were tied to real estate
market, somewhere between 25
and 30 percent of the entire economy was tied to housing.”
Oppenheim, whose firm once
represented mostly mid-sized
family builders with revenue between $20 million to $50 million
a year, says that his firm’s real
estate practice went from boom to
bust overnight.
“All of a sudden, our phones
stopped ringing. Most of our clients disappeared. Soon our business dropped by 90 percent. We
had a wonderful staff of people
with nothing to do.”
He has since reinvented himself
as an advocate for homeowners
screwed by banks in the foreclosure debacle.
How bad did it get? Three out
of six the housing counselors at
Tampa’s Housing & Education
Alliance, a nonprofit in the struggling north end of that city, lost
their homes to foreclosure over
the past five years, as the agency
saw a sharp drop in funding from
government and private sources,
including banks, and the counselors accepted big pay cuts or became volunteers.
In May 2006, at the peak of the
housing bubble, the construction
industry employed 691,000 Floridians, according to the state Bu-