All along State Road 54 in Pasco County, Florida—forty-five minutes northeast of Tampa—the pine trees and palmettos and orange groves have been cleared to make way for new developments. Developers dreamed up instant communities and christened them with names evoking the ease of English manor life: Ashton Oaks, Saddle Ridge Estates, the Hammocks at Kingsway. Across flat and empty fields of wire grass, the developers paved suburban streets and called them Old Waverly Court and Rolling Greene Drive.
They parcelled out lots smaller than a quarter acre and built, with concrete blocks and stucco, look-alike two-story beige and yellow houses; columned archways over the front doors lent an illusion of elegance. The houses sold for two or three hundred thousand dollars to some of the thousand or so people who moved to Florida every day, or to middle-class people who already lived there but wanted to get farther away from Tampa, where most of them had jobs. Nearby, shopping malls and megachurches sprang up.
By last year, Pasco County, where twenty thousand people lived in , had nearly half a million residents. A few days after the Presidential election of , the Times devoted an article to Pasco County, saying that it was the kind of place that had given Florida, and the White House, to George W.
Recently, I drove around some of the subdivisions on State Road 54, as well as in other parts of Tampa Bay and in southwest Florida. In the past two years, property values in Twin Lakes had dropped by more than a hundred thousand dollars.
One house had been for sale for almost two years. Farther east on State Road 54, in a subdivision called Country Walk, there were streets whose pavement stopped a few feet from where it began, as if the developer had changed his mind.
