HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
TWILIGHT IN THE SUNSHINE STATE
his wife in one of the older parts of
the neighborhood, which means he
built his house way back in 2000.
“The retired folks around here
have done just fine,” he says,
pointing to the homes of neighbors. “It’s the young people who
got in trouble.”
What does he think about the
state’s future, I ask, what with
all the budget cuts and drop in
home values?
“If you don’t have kids you don’t
pay much attention,” he says.
OVER OUR DEAD BODIES
For most of its history, Florida
below the panhandle was an unpleasant mélange of swamp, forest, mosquitos and alligators,
along with the occasional citrus
plantation and sweaty homesteader, who probably wished he
had moved to Oregon instead.
In 1924, with the hope of encouraging rich people to move to
the state, voters approved a constitutional amendment banning a
state income tax. This effort didn’t
accomplish its goal — much of the
interior was still a fetid swamp
and most northerners considered
even beachfront property uninhabitable for half the year.
Air conditioning changed everything. From 1950 to 2010, lured
by the enticing combination of
sunny beaches and cool bedrooms,
the population shot up 600 percent, to 19 million from 2.7 million. Sometime around 2016,
Florida’s population will top 20
million, replacing New York as the
third biggest U.S. state.
All this population growth hid
deep flaws in Florida’s economy.
It became far too reliant on tourism jobs, construction jobs and
jobs in the service sector. These
workers suffered the most when
the economy crashed.
At Metropolitan Ministries, a
homeless shelter in north Tampa,
I meet Dennis Hebert, a wellspoken 26-year-old who lost his
job last summer as the manager of
the dairy section of a Winn-Dixie
last summer. In October, unable to
find work, he moved with his wife
and five-year-old son into a car,
where they lived for a week, parking overnight at the beach or in a
Walmart parking lot.
“It was hot and we got a lot
of bug bites,” Hebert recalls. “I
couldn’t sleep because I was constantly on guard. The worst part
was that my child kept crying that
he wanted to go home.”
Hebert says and his family are
lucky, though. Tampa has one of
the highest percentages of homeless children in the U.S. and the
waiting list to get a small room
here is about three months. The
shelter offers a place to sleep,