The Swamp Peddlers

513 East University Avenue,Gainesville FL 32601

20 April, 2023

Description

In partnership with the University of Florida Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience, and the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, we are excited to welcome historian and author Dr. Jason Vuic to share about his latest book The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream. In his lecture, Vuic will dive into the history of the "installment land sales industry,” which seemingly appeared out of nowhere to sell billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded homesite waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build. The result was Cape Coral, Port St. Lucie, Deltona, Port Charlotte, Palm Coast, and Spring Hill, among many others--sprawling exurban communities with no downtowns and little industry but millions of residential lots. These communities allowed generations of northerners to move to Florida cheaply, but at a price: high-pressure sales tactics begat fraud; poor urban planning begat sprawl; developers cleared forests, drained wetlands, and built thousands of miles of roads in grid-like subdivisions, which, fifty years later, played an inordinate role in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. This program is sponsored by the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with support from the Humanities Fund, the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine under award number 2000013562, and the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER).