How the lot-sales boom created faceless Florida communities that bedevil the state to this day. By Jason Vuic
The year was 1959, and Florida’s mega-community-building brothers—Elliott, Robert, and Frank Mackle—had a problem. The Mackles were part owners of, and the driving force behind, the Miami-based General Development Corporation (GDC). The company was a Wall Street-listed leviathan that bought ranches and scrubland in the coastal interior of Florida to build from scratch entire communities, indeed whole cities, and populate them with white, working-class retirees. For $10 down and $10 a month—“the price of cigarette money!” blared their ads—retired policemen or bus drivers or teachers could buy a piece of the Florida dream: an 80-by-125-foot homesite that would be waiting for them when they decided to build.
The Mackles were leaders among the many developers, from giant corporations to fly-by-night fraudsters, who created a billion-dollar industry between 1955 and 1975 by slicing and dicing raw, often inaccessible, impenetrable and waterlogged Florida land, and selling it one lot at a time. The two dozen freestanding communities these developers created include Port Charlotte, Port St. Lucie, North Port, Port Malabar (which despite their seafaring names were mainly inland and never had been or ever would be ports), Golden Gate, Deltona, Marco Island, Rotonda, Lehigh Acres, Marion Oaks and Spring Hill.
All shared certain features: an endless network of often shoddily built roads connecting thousands of lots, which had been scraped clear of trees and other foliage and most of which would be uninhabitable for years; environmentally disastrous septic systems instead of municipal sewage systems; and little, if any, land reserved for downtowns, industry, parks, schools or other infrastructure that makes communities livable and prosperous. Some were also crisscrossed by as many canals as the developers could dredge from nearby waters, a process that allowed them to sell newly created “waterfront” property at a premium but also wreaked havoc on natural systems.
For decades vacant lots in these communities far outnumbered residents, but now their populations have boomed along with the rest of Florida, and they are struggling with complex and perhaps unsolvable issues resulting from the thoughtless development of their creators, whose goal was never to plan a community but to sell as many lots as possible.
“We Gotta Sell Them Something”
The Mackles came to the idea of creating and selling Florida lots almost by accident, when they published an ad in Life magazine for homes in a modest retirement community in Pompano Beach, Florida. The problem: They received more than 18,000 inquiries, but only 127 people opted to buy. It turned out many retirees were interested in Florida real estate but weren’t ready to move. Sometimes one spouse still worked or the couple had children at home waiting to marry or graduate.
Frank said to his brothers: “We’ve gotta sell them something!” So they came up with a plan: “$10 down on the lot only,” he told a Tampa Tribune reporter in 1992, “figuring [buyers would] hire us to build the home when they could.” They first tried the tactic in 1957 with a seven-week, $2 million ad campaign for the Southwest Florida community of Port Charlotte.
Built on the southern half of a 78,000-acre ranch straddling Charlotte and Sarasota counties, Port Charlotte not only didn’t have a port, it also didn’t have a store, only a smattering of model homes in a cow pasture along U.S. 41. But in ad after ad after ad, the Mackles pitched the community as one of the finest in Florida, where the “healthful, mild climate” and “dry, fertile land” made it the “ideal spot for you!” Just fill out the attached coupon and mail $10 to this address: Port Charlotte Division, General Development Corporation, P.O. Box 45-465, Miami, Florida, 33134. By doing so, buyers agreed to pay $10 a month for upwards of 90 months on an $895 lot. Corner or canal-front lots cost a bit more.
Most would never see the property before they bought it; GDC would send buyers a map marked with an “X” where their lot was supposed to be. It seemed preposterous: buying lots through the mail, sight unseen. But the Mackles struck a nerve, and soon GDC’s Miami headquarters was inundated with cash. In fact, the Mackles received so much cash and so many envelopes full of coupons, they were forced to rent a second building and hire secretaries just to process them all. For the year, GDC did $15.5 million in installment land sales in Port Charlotte, versus just $6.7 million in homes. The numbers were revelatory. And though builders at heart, the Mackles realized that the money wasn’t in construction, but in lots—in building lots and lots of lots, in “buying by the acre and selling by the foot.”
So GDC pivoted, from coupons in magazines to a network of call centers and hundreds of independent and company-run brokerages worldwide, using relentless and aggressive sales tactics. The company cast a wide net, sponsoring radio, TV, and magazine ads, “win-a-week in Florida” contests, film showings, sales dinners, train trips, bus trips, so-called “fly-and-buy” programs (a technique so successful that another land giant, Gulf American, had Cessnas taking off every eight minutes in 1961, ferrying 100,000 prospects to its Cape Coral community every year), and the ubiquitous celebrity “spokespitch.”
An office in Munich targeted servicemen, another in Rome tourists, while salesgirls in bathing suits manned booths in Northern train stations on a faux Florida beach. The goal was to sell, sell, sell! And sell GDC did, so much so that its stock price rocketed from $10 a share in 1958 to an astonishing $77.50 a share in 1959.
But excessive lot sales came at a cost. Port Charlotte was “weirdly unfinished,” remembers a resident who arrived there in 1960, “with a house here, then nothing; a house there, then nothing. All laid out in that big Mackle grid. That first trip, we came down [U.S. 41] and took a left, and there was one house waaaay out in the distance. And that was our house. Mom and Dad were trying to be upbeat, saying ‘home sweet home’ and all that, but my only thought was ‘where the [f–k] are we?’”
Because lot sales trumped home sales, the Mackles seeded Port Charlotte with a mind-boggling 200,000 lots, which, under state law, had to be connected to a road—a paved road—so Port Charlotte’s blacktop stretched for thousands of miles. There were roads everywhere, but very few homes.
“The whole place is subdivided into little neighborhoods of the future,” wrote journalist Rick Barry in 1981, “and crisscrossed with more streets than Tampa and St. Petersburg have between them. That’s enough blacktop to pave a two-lane road to Seattle. And more than 90 percent of those roads go nowhere.”
Urban planning experts called it “premature subdivision”—that is, the platting of land into huge numbers of homesites before anyone wanted to live there, bad enough in one community, but a process repeated by developers statewide. By 1965, 234 companies in Florida were selling 50 lots or more. The biggest of these were the “land giants,” who, in addition to GDC, included the Deltona Corporation, the ITT Levitt Development Corporation, the Lehigh Acres Development Corporation and Florida’s biggest and most aggressive developer of all, the Gulf American Corporation.
Longtime Florida planning expert Bill Spikowski points out that these giant developers weren’t planners. “They were just trying to sell vacant lots,” he recently told WBBH television news reporter Evan Dean in Fort Myers. So “one square mile” here is “like the next square mile…. You have a sameness and a repetition [in these communities] that is really unusual.” They have few sidewalks, no downtowns and a tiny number of parks or industrial zones, while banks, restaurants and strip malls line sprawling business districts on either side of a road.
“It’s proved to be a devastating problem for us,” said former Port St. Lucie mayor Bob Minsky in 1998 to the Indian River Press Journal. “The configuration of the city was laid out with the wisdom of laying out a cemetery. They just divided it into a grid and sold off every piece they could.”
An End-Around for the Ages
By 1959, GDC’s Port Charlotte business was booming. The Mackles’ installment-land-sales scheme had paid off handsomely, so they turned to the Sarasota County portion of their Port Charlotte property. They wanted to build a second community, called “North Port Charlotte” or “North Port” for short, 10 miles to the north of Port Charlotte. That meant more lots, potentially tens of thousands of lots, and someday homes, some 30 miles from the county seat at Sarasota.
There was nothing there, just pine trees and palmetto brush with a highway in the middle, but GDC planned on cookie-cuttering the area, a full five-square-miles worth, with homesites and roads. Such a massive undertaking would have been easy to do in Charlotte County, which, at the time, had no county zoning codes whatsoever.
But Sarasota County did, and when the Mackles tried to subdivide their land, the Sarasota County Commission said “no.” The commission wanted to limit growth and to guarantee that an isolated development at the far end of the county wouldn’t drain services or require infrastructure, such as water and sewer, which the Mackles were unlikely to build.
But the Mackles, who had deep pockets and close friends in Tallahassee, pulled an end-around for the ages: They moved 10 or so GDC employees and their families into model homes in North Port and had sympathetic legislators pass a bill allowing North Port’s “residents” to vote on incorporating themselves into a city. Sarasota officials were livid.
“The whole thing is a joke,” griped Sarasota County planning director William Vines to The St. Petersburg Times, and it’s “not a funny joke either. There is absolutely no reason for the incorporation of this area except to avoid county regulations…[Now] all of the normal rules that apply to developers are out the window.”
The residents’ vote was 20-1 for incorporation, with the minimal (and laughable) requirement that voters had lived in the community for at least 10 days. The new North Port had no city hall, but its mayor, police court judge and city commissioner was a man named Bill Gregory, who just happened to manage the GDC operation in Port Charlotte.
Gregory and other North Port commissioners were all GDC employees, so they did what the company told them to do. In early 1960, before hiring a single police officer or building a city hall, they voted to annex from Sarasota County an additional 16,640 acres of land, which GDC divided into lots and connected to roads. Other annexations through 1970 effectively pushed the borders of North Port—which, by that point, had only 3,000 residents (Tampa had about 275,000)—to a whopping 67.5 square miles, or 43,200 acres, making it at the time the third-largest municipality by land area in the state of Florida.
Soon there were 75,000 lots with paved thoroughfares, roads that attracted drug smugglers looking for places to land their Cessnas. They called it “North Port International Airport” or “Little LaGuardia,” because during Florida’s winter, which coincided with the marijuana-growing season in South America, police noticed “two or three landing marks weekly” on North Port roads.
With so much land to cover and so few policemen, smugglers had to crash to be caught. However, most landed on flat, clear streets, where, at night, drivers in vans would lay out flares and wait for them. Then they would offload bales of marijuana or bricks of cocaine and drive off. Of course, drug flights landed all over Florida, not just in North Port, but smugglers loved lot-sales communities and their networks of empty streets.
“We figure as much as 90 percent of all marijuana smuggled into to the United States comes from Colombia,” a DEA investigator told the Fort Myers News-Press in 1979. “We figure 80 percent of that 90 percent is touching American soil somewhere along the Southwest Florida coastline.” There, he explained, “the streets have been paved—perfect landing strips—there are no trees and certain sections are totally uninhabited.”
Lots of Land, But Not Enough for Businesses
Much of North Port would remain uninhabited for decades, its streets crumbling, as GDC built too many roads (and with inferior materials) with not enough taxpayers to pay to maintain them. (Bad roads plague so many of these lot-sales communities that when four GDC top officials were imprisoned for defrauding buyers in 1993, the mayor of Palm Bay complained to Florida Today, “Putting them behind bars doesn’t do us any good…They should have [been forced to work on] the road crew” to “fill in all the potholes…they left us.”)
This was the legacy of lot selling, when, Florida-wide, poor urban planning and a lack of zoning resulted in some 2,600 antiquated subdivisions with more than 2.1 million lots. Platted in the 1950s and ’60s, most of these lots were zoned “single-family residential,” which meant that in Lehigh Acres, for example, you can see one lot with one home (or more commonly an empty lot waiting for a home) 135,000 times. Meanwhile, the Lehigh Acres Development Corporation used just two percent of its land for businesses, a sufficient number in, say, 1970, when its population was just over 4,000 people. But fast forward to 2024, when Lehigh’s population is around 125,000 and growing, and businesses have nowhere to go. Lehigh has lots of land, ironically, but not enough acreage for commerce.
Therefore, companies don’t move there, particularly those needing large corporate campuses or factories. And that means few jobs exist, outside of the low-paying service sector and construction, which is cyclical. It’s a hard problem to solve, since a 2006 Florida law prohibits government agencies from using eminent domain to acquire privately owned residential properties for economic redevelopment. The result is that Lehigh Acres, North Port, Port St. Lucie and other lot-sales communities have been straitjacketed by decisions made in the past.
And the lack of commercial space is a tax issue as well, because while the typical American city is roughly “25 to 30 percent commercial,” Cape Coral’s development director told the Fort Myers News-Press in 2005, “we have about 8 percent, which means residents pay a disproportionate share of the taxes…Businesses use fewer services and pay greater taxes because of their size than residents do. [They] don’t strain schools with additional students, don’t ask for parks, and don’t use police or emergency medical services as often as residents [do, either].”
Then there’s the size of these communities—they’re enormous. Today, five of the 10 largest municipalities by land area in Florida are former land giant communities. Cape Coral, for example, encompasses a staggering 106 square miles.
The Gulf American Corporation sold lots in Cape Coral and buyers built houses there randomly, because no one told them not to. They didn’t plan construction in phases, nor did they build outward from a central core, so fire protection, policing, and trash collection must extend over tremendous and sometimes sparsely populated areas, making them needlessly expensive; and water and sewer lines have been added retroactively at a jaw-dropping cost.
For example, in the once barren but now increasingly crowded northern sections of Cape Coral, the city is running out of water, because everyone has wells and the Mid Hawthorn Aquifer is drying up. To connect residents, the city plans to charge property owners roughly $35,000 a lot, paid annually in installments at 6.5 percent interest. It’s too much for many to bear, considering the median household income in Cape Coral is approximately $65,000. Add inflation as well as rising insurance costs, and some residents say they are being forced out. “We can’t stay another 10, 12, 15 years,” one homeowner said to ABC Channel 7 in Fort Myers, claiming constant land development has drained the community of water. “It’s ridiculous…. [We need to] stop building” and “let the city catch up.”
But that’s just it: Cape Coral shouldn’t have been such a sprawling and poorly equipped city in the first place. One-hundred and twenty thousand lots platted and accepted by Lee County with only septic tanks and water wells to service them? What could go wrong? And what about its lack of sidewalks and parks, or its 400 miles of algae-filled canals cut through wetlands, or its more than 1,400 miles of roads? Where was the planning? And how was it approved in the first place?
The answers lie in the 1950s, when “the idea from the beginning,” wrote author Paul Reyes, “was to sell lots, nothing more,” when “no forethought was given to the possibility that someone might actually want to live there, no consideration given to streets or schools or sewers,” when “selling, not building, was how these developers measured their success.”
Behind everything, of course, was a lack of regulation, because ’50s-era land development was the Wild West. Prior to the 1970s, cities and towns in Florida had the blanket legal authority to plan and zone, but counties did not. Some, such as Sarasota, had asked for and received special legislation allowing them to regulate development, hence its battle with North Port; but well into the 1960s, dozens of Florida counties had no building restrictions whatsoever.
“Those backhoes, and those sales pitches, and those resort hotel rooms created jobs,” said Wayne Daltry, a retired official with the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council, to the Charlotte County Florida Weekly in 2017. “There was no immediate demand or much interest in regulatory controls. Heck, counties weren’t even authorized to regulate [developers] without a special act of the legislature.”
More People, More Problems
Florida’s lot-sales craziness came to an end by the mid-1970s, when the advent of state and federal environmental regulations, county zoning restrictions and hefty inflation made installment land sales schemes unprofitable. By that point, Florida had millions of empty lots, some in communities abandoned by developers that lie fallow to this day, including the southern half of Golden Gate Estates near Naples, Cape Atlantic Estates near New Smyrna Beach and University Highlands near Deland. However, dozens of other communities, including nearly a dozen built by the Mackles as heads of the General Development Corporation and later the Deltona Corporation, have grown explosively, in particular North Port, which in 2024 approached the 100,000-resident mark and celebrated its 65th birthday. It is today the fastest-growing small city in the United States.
“[We are]…flourishing here in North Port and in the region,” Vinnie Mascarenhas, the city’s business development manager recently told Fox News Tampa Bay. “We’re strategically located on Interstate 75, with deep seaports and airports [near us] and lots, thousands, many thousands of acres of undeveloped land.”
Despite his enthusiasm, developing that land, which is zoned largely for single-family residential, will be expensive. According to a 2021 estimate, North Port still has 45,000 lots with no sewer connections. But because GDC incorporated North Port to avoid Sarasota County zoning restrictions in the 1950s, which would have required sewage, it will now cost residents upwards of a billion dollars to connect. Eventually, they will connect, and at build out North Port will have 250,000 people.
The trick will be in retrofitting the community—and all of Florida’s lot-sales communities—with what GDC and other Land Giant corporations failed to provide, namely water and sewer; mixed-use and downtown-like shopping areas and industrial zones; parks and public gathering spaces; plus sidewalks and foot paths for “walkability.” It’s a herculean task, and though North Port has annexed surrounding land for greenspace and parks and has added the 8,000-acre “master planned community” of Wellen Park, most of it is still trapped, permanently, by 80-by-125-foot lots platted in the ’60s, when single-family homesites were the cornerstones of Florida land development.
Today more than one million Floridians live in communities that the biggest of these lot sellers developed and sold, and more residents are coming. By 2050, for example, North Port will have an estimated 265,000 people; Lehigh Acres, 350,000; and Cape Coral, 400,000. And like it or not, they will all create sprawl, because that is what happens when you divide land, without rational planning, into millions of residential lots. You get traffic; pollution; poisoned and destroyed aquifers from relentless well-building and canal-building and runoff; low tax bases stretched thin for want of business districts or industries; and environmental damage on a mass scale, in which cleared lots now grow invasive melaleuca trees instead of native scrub brush and pine.
But there is some hope. Planners understand the problems and are focused on redevelopment. They’re proposing to not only retrofit downtowns, when possible, but to build commercial hubs, in effect mini-downtown areas, in different parts of communities. Once moribund Port Charlotte, for example, is replacing a 26-acre, 230,000-square-foot, ’70s-era shopping mall with a walkable, mixed-used “downtown” featuring shops, apartments, businesses, restaurants, offices and even a boutique hotel. Likewise, Cape Coral is adding 218 condominium units, a restaurant, and nearly 60,000 square feet of commercial space to a “downtown” waterfront area on the Caloosahatchee.
Is it too little, too late? And will fixing these communities—from adding sidewalks to building downtowns to finally connecting homes to sewer and water—prove prohibitively expensive? Planners admit success is not certain. But they say their communities won’t be appealing and livable places with unique identities and a shared sense of belonging unless they try.
Jason Vuic, who grew up in Punta Gorda. is the author of four books, including Florida Book Award gold medal-winning The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream (UNC Press, 2021). 
So GDC pivoted, from coupons in magazines to a network of call centers and hundreds of independent and company-run brokerages worldwide, using relentless and aggressive sales tactics. The company cast a wide net, sponsoring radio, TV, and magazine ads, “win-a-week in Florida” contests, film showings, sales dinners, train trips, bus trips, so-called “fly-and-buy” programs (a technique so successful that another land giant, Gulf American, had Cessnas taking off every eight minutes in 1961, ferrying 100,000 prospects to its Cape Coral community every year), and the ubiquitous celebrity “spokespitch.”
An office in Munich targeted servicemen, another in Rome tourists, while salesgirls in bathing suits manned booths in Northern train stations on a faux Florida beach. The goal was to sell, sell, sell! And sell GDC did, so much so that its stock price rocketed from $10 a share in 1958 to an astonishing $77.50 a share in 1959.
But excessive lot sales came at a cost. Port Charlotte was “weirdly unfinished,” remembers a resident who arrived there in 1960, “with a house here, then nothing; a house there, then nothing. All laid out in that big Mackle grid. That first trip, we came down [U.S. 41] and took a left, and there was one house waaaay out in the distance. And that was our house. Mom and Dad were trying to be upbeat, saying ‘home sweet home’ and all that, but my only thought was ‘where the [f–k] are we?’”
Because lot sales trumped home sales, the Mackles seeded Port Charlotte with a mind-boggling 200,000 lots, which, under state law, had to be connected to a road—a paved road—so Port Charlotte’s blacktop stretched for thousands of miles. There were roads everywhere, but very few homes.
“The whole place is subdivided into little neighborhoods of the future,” wrote journalist Rick Barry in 1981, “and crisscrossed with more streets than Tampa and St. Petersburg have between them. That’s enough blacktop to pave a two-lane road to Seattle. And more than 90 percent of those roads go nowhere.”
Urban planning experts called it “premature subdivision”—that is, the platting of land into huge numbers of homesites before anyone wanted to live there, bad enough in one community, but a process repeated by developers statewide. By 1965, 234 companies in Florida were selling 50 lots or more. The biggest of these were the “land giants,” who, in addition to GDC, included the Deltona Corporation, the ITT Levitt Development Corporation, the Lehigh Acres Development Corporation and Florida’s biggest and most aggressive developer of all, the Gulf American Corporation.
Longtime Florida planning expert Bill Spikowski points out that these giant developers weren’t planners. “They were just trying to sell vacant lots,” he recently told WBBH television news reporter Evan Dean in Fort Myers. So “one square mile” here is “like the next square mile…. You have a sameness and a repetition [in these communities] that is really unusual.” They have few sidewalks, no downtowns and a tiny number of parks or industrial zones, while banks, restaurants and strip malls line sprawling business districts on either side of a road.
“It’s proved to be a devastating problem for us,” said former Port St. Lucie mayor Bob Minsky in 1998 to the Indian River Press Journal. “The configuration of the city was laid out with the wisdom of laying out a cemetery. They just divided it into a grid and sold off every piece they could.”
This was the legacy of lot selling, when, Florida-wide, poor urban planning and a lack of zoning resulted in some 2,600 antiquated subdivisions with more than 2.1 million lots. Platted in the 1950s and ’60s, most of these lots were zoned “single-family residential,” which meant that in Lehigh Acres, for example, you can see one lot with one home (or more commonly an empty lot waiting for a home) 135,000 times. Meanwhile, the Lehigh Acres Development Corporation used just two percent of its land for businesses, a sufficient number in, say, 1970, when its population was just over 4,000 people. But fast forward to 2024, when Lehigh’s population is around 125,000 and growing, and businesses have nowhere to go. Lehigh has lots of land, ironically, but not enough acreage for commerce.
Therefore, companies don’t move there, particularly those needing large corporate campuses or factories. And that means few jobs exist, outside of the low-paying service sector and construction, which is cyclical. It’s a hard problem to solve, since a 2006 Florida law prohibits government agencies from using eminent domain to acquire privately owned residential properties for economic redevelopment. The result is that Lehigh Acres, North Port, Port St. Lucie and other lot-sales communities have been straitjacketed by decisions made in the past.
And the lack of commercial space is a tax issue as well, because while the typical American city is roughly “25 to 30 percent commercial,” Cape Coral’s development director told the Fort Myers News-Press in 2005, “we have about 8 percent, which means residents pay a disproportionate share of the taxes…Businesses use fewer services and pay greater taxes because of their size than residents do. [They] don’t strain schools with additional students, don’t ask for parks, and don’t use police or emergency medical services as often as residents [do, either].”
Then there’s the size of these communities—they’re enormous. Today, five of the 10 largest municipalities by land area in Florida are former land giant communities. Cape Coral, for example, encompasses a staggering 106 square miles.
The Gulf American Corporation sold lots in Cape Coral and buyers built houses there randomly, because no one told them not to. They didn’t plan construction in phases, nor did they build outward from a central core, so fire protection, policing, and trash collection must extend over tremendous and sometimes sparsely populated areas, making them needlessly expensive; and water and sewer lines have been added retroactively at a jaw-dropping cost. 
For example, in the once barren but now increasingly crowded northern sections of Cape Coral, the city is running out of water, because everyone has wells and the Mid Hawthorn Aquifer is drying up. To connect residents, the city plans to charge property owners roughly $35,000 a lot, paid annually in installments at 6.5 percent interest. It’s too much for many to bear, considering the median household income in Cape Coral is approximately $65,000. Add inflation as well as rising insurance costs, and some residents say they are being forced out. “We can’t stay another 10, 12, 15 years,” one homeowner said to ABC Channel 7 in Fort Myers, claiming constant land development has drained the community of water. “It’s ridiculous…. [We need to] stop building” and “let the city catch up.”
But that’s just it: Cape Coral shouldn’t have been such a sprawling and poorly equipped city in the first place. One-hundred and twenty thousand lots platted and accepted by Lee County with only septic tanks and water wells to service them? What could go wrong? And what about its lack of sidewalks and parks, or its 400 miles of algae-filled canals cut through wetlands, or its more than 1,400 miles of roads? Where was the planning? And how was it approved in the first place?
The answers lie in the 1950s, when “the idea from the beginning,” wrote author Paul Reyes, “was to sell lots, nothing more,” when “no forethought was given to the possibility that someone might actually want to live there, no consideration given to streets or schools or sewers,” when “selling, not building, was how these developers measured their success.”
Behind everything, of course, was a lack of regulation, because ’50s-era land development was the Wild West. Prior to the 1970s, cities and towns in Florida had the blanket legal authority to plan and zone, but counties did not. Some, such as Sarasota, had asked for and received special legislation allowing them to regulate development, hence its battle with North Port; but well into the 1960s, dozens of Florida counties had no building restrictions whatsoever.
“Those backhoes, and those sales pitches, and those resort hotel rooms created jobs,” said Wayne Daltry, a retired official with the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council, to the Charlotte County Florida Weekly in 2017. “There was no immediate demand or much interest in regulatory controls. Heck, counties weren’t even authorized to regulate [developers] without a special act of the legislature.”
Jason Vuic, who grew up in Punta Gorda. is the author of four books, including Florida Book Award gold medal-winning The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream (UNC Press, 2021).