So who was the housing boom for, anyway? Speculators ... by gimleteye

In Florida the special interests who giddily presided over the housing bubble are the same ones presiding over our current economic crash. Many of these have gone through one election cycle under the banner of the Tea Party. Now they have Gov. Rick Scott, a political neophyte, to help their cause of loosening environmental and growth management regulations in order to create "jobs". Let's be clear: Barack Obama may be in charge today, but he inherited and miscalculated an economic disaster from earlier presidents. In Florida, the forces who steered the economy onto the economic reefs have paid no price. They are now scavenging its remains. This is literally the case of public lands, purchased by the public, that Gov. Scott now plans to get rid of, as "excess".

So who did the housing boom serve, anyhow? The website Condo Vulture has the following insight: "Only 13 percent of the more than 43,200 South Florida condo units created and sold since the real estate boom began in 2003 are owned by primary users" according to data compiled from taxpayers filing for Florida's Homestead Exemption. The number of primary home owners is even lower in Downtown Miami.

What is the importance of this number? Chiefly, that second home owners are passive investors who are not likely to be interested or to be involved in their communities, or local politics. Condo Vultures omits the chief culprit: speculators. A speculator is an investor who takes outsized risk ignoring empirical evidence. The rewards for speculators can be greater than investors whose tolerance for risk is balanced by conservative goals, including preservation of capital.

To seasoned observers, it was clear during the boom how lobbyists used their own, manufactured evidence to support complicated, expensive campaigns at the local political level in order to "free" more open space and farmland into the Growth Machine. Resistance by county planners who had data at their fingertips was futile. "Demand exceeds supply." "It is what the market wants." These platitudes accompanied heaps of money changing hands with winks and nods in the Chamber hallways.

The business elite who presided over so much destruction of capital were not investors. They may have started out as investors, hemmed in by federal banking regulations that kept lending institutions far from the gamblers. But as the foundation of the US economy began to crack, in the 1980's, the speculators seized from our governments the keys to the vault. (If we had sensible people running our government, how could we have incurred multi-billion dollar municipal deficits in South Florida?)

This is the speculator culture that consumed Florida wetlands and wrecked the Everglades and harmed chances for restoration, one platted subdivision at a time. They are the same speculators in control of the GOP-led Florida legislature. Gov. Rick Scott, who has taken the hatchet to growth management and budgets allocated to environmental protection, is their man now.

I don't begrudge gamblers who want to take their own money and go to the Genting casino or risk their capital otherwise. Look at the facts. Look at the data. The Tea Party and independent voters need to turn their attention to traitors in their midst. You can identify many of them by the American flag lapels in their suits. They supported speculators during the housing boom and they are supporting speculators today.