Florida country boom
The Florida Land Boom (in the American Great Florida Land Boom ) was Florida's first real estate bubble . It burst in 1926 and left a number of new cities and development projects planned on the drawing board, such as Isola di Lolando in the north of Biscayne Bay . The creation of greenfield cities that still exist today shaped Florida's future for decades in advance.
prehistory
The oil magnate Henry Morrison Flagler began the tourist development of Florida in 1885. He was the builder of the railway line on Florida's east coast ( Florida East Coast Railway ), which resulted in cities such as West Palm Beach and Miami . On January 22nd, 1912, the first train went to Key West . Flagler created a kind of American Riviera , which attracted tourists and residents from the north to Florida.
Economic prosperity in the 1920s set the stage for developing land speculation in Florida. Miami had acquired an image of a tropical paradise and investors from all over the United States became interested in real estate in Miami. Partly because of the ability of land developers - such as Carl G. Fisher of Miami Beach , who became famous for renting a giant illuminated billboard in New York City's Time Square that said , " It's June In Miami ” - property prices rose and speculation led to a boom in real estate and development.
Burst of the bubble
In January 1925 the first negative press comments were heard. The Forbes magazine warned that prices for land based in Florida only on the expectation of finding a subsequent buyer and not on a real land value. Independently from each other, New York bankers and the Internal Revenue Service began tearing apart the Florida real estate boom as a giant deception. Investors' desire for high speculative profits became increasingly illusory because it was difficult to find new buyers. The inevitable bursting of the bubble had begun.
In October 1925, the railroad companies tried to improve the overworked situation on Florida's rail network and imposed a ban on all goods with the exception of food, thereby increasing the rising cost of living even more. There were no new buyers and that is why the price spiral that had fueled the land boom ended. Gone were the days of buying and selling real estate ten times at auction in one day.
On January 10, 1926, the approximately 80 m long schooner Prinz Valdemar capsized in the entrance to the port of Miami. The former Danish warship was on its way to Florida to be converted into a floating hotel.
The railways, which were busy with transporting building materials and food, raised their freight rates. With the sea route to Miami blocked, Miami's face began to crumble as a tropical paradise. In his book, Miami Millions , Kenneth Ballinger wrote that the capsizing of Prince Valdemar saved a lot of people a lot of money.
In the same year, the Miami hurricane in 1926 brought many ailing development projects to bankruptcy. The Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928 and the Black Friday of 1929 were other key issues for the downward trend of the economic development of the state and the "land boom" ended even before the global economic crisis really began. This recession and the arrival of the Mediterranean fruit fly hit both the tourism industry and the citrus growers on which Florida relied heavily. Within a few years, an idyllic tropical paradise transformed into a pale, humid and remote area with no economic prospects. Florida's economy only recovered after World War II .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Translation of the image description: The drainage of wetlands, the progressive construction of railway lines and the expansion of the highways paved the way for the Great Florida Land Boom in the mid-1920s. The picture, taken a few years before the height of the speculative frenzy, shows Florida being advertised as a haven for residents and a money machine for potential investors. Cities like Miami and St. Petersburg grew ten-fold in less than two decades when the money invested in home construction and hotel development ran into the millions. In 1924, Florida amended its constitution to outlaw income and inheritance taxes, which provided more incentives for investors and business owners to visit the area. Excessive land values and the uncontrolled issuance of ill-advised loans led to a speculative bubble that burst in 1925. The collapse of the Florida Land Boom was one in a series of specific events that heralded the start of the Great Depression in 1929
- ^ The Beginning of the Road
- ^ Bob Leonard: Florida in the 1920's - The Great Florida Land Boom ( English ) floridahistory.org. Retrieved August 6, 2008.
- ↑ Alexander O. Boulton: The Tropical Twenties ( English ) American Heritage. Archived from the original on December 1, 2008. Retrieved on August 6, 2008.
- ^ Ruby Leach Carson, "Forty Years of Miami Beach," Tequesta , 1955., p. 21.