Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

Former Fortune writer Knowlton (Cattle Kingdom) charts the 1920s Florida real estate market’s plummet from boom to bust in this vivid narrative. Arguing that Florida’s 1927 real estate market collapse helped to cause the Great Depression, Knowlton describes the post-WWI transformation of South Florida as “dramatic” and “lunatic.” He profiles ambitious developers and architects including Carl Fisher, who turned his family’s grapefruit plantation into the planned community of Coral Gables, and Addison Mizner, who popularized the Spanish Colonial aesthetic, and documents the efforts of marketers and Wall Street investors to convince people to move to Florida. Knowlton credits writer and environmental philanthropist Marjory Stoneman Douglas for documenting the loss of bird populations and natural flood protection as stuccoed subdivisions were carved out of the Everglades swampland. Displaced black Floridians, he notes, were welcome in new mansions as servants but forced to live outside of all-white towns in inferior conditions. Overvaluation and a lack of oversight eventually caused a market crash that “spread like an infection,” Knowlton writes, drawing a comparison to Florida’s role in the 2008 financial crisis. Knowlton successfully captures the vibrancy and mixed legacy of Florida’s boom years and makes a convincing, if familiar, case for the state as an economic bellwether. (Jan.)