the protagonist talks about her days as an engineer at IBM. One day she asked her manager why he had a clock counting down. The manager said that it was showing him the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until he could retire. Why did he care? “Because that is the moment when I can start living,” was what the guy said. As a result of this conversation, the Queen of Versailles quit her engineering job and took up fashion modeling in Manhattan. Then she devoted herself to being the wife of a rich guy and mother to seven children.
The funniest line in the movie was Jackie Siegel talking about the setbacks during the Collapse of 2008 forcing the family to travel to Upstate New York via commercial airline. One of the younger kids, accustomed to the Gulfstream life, asked “Mommy, what are all of these people doing on our plane?”
Jackie Siegel is back, finishing Versailles, her huge Orlando house, in front of an TV audience (Queen of Versailles Reigns Again; streaming on HBO). (In the 2012 documentary, I remember she and her husband saying that the inspiration for the house was the Paris casino in Vegas and not Louis XIV’s bungalow in Frogland, but in this new TV series they talk about the French original as the inspiration.)
The saddest event between the two documentaries is that one of the Siegels’ daughters was addicted to Xanax and was entrusted to rehab. She formed an alliance with a fellow patient, ultimately pronounced cured by the psychologists. As soon as they were out of rehab, he introduced her to heroin. She was dead of a methadone overdose at age 18 (New York Post):
Victoria, who was a big part of the documentary, had gone to rehab to deal with a Xanax addiction. It was there she met her 26-year-old boyfriend.
“The day she got out, she tried her first heroin … a month later she was dead,” Jackie said. The boyfriend later died of a drug overdose as well.
(About 20 years ago, a friend paid handsomely for his childhood best friend to go to the Betty Ford Clinic for treatment of alcoholism. At Betty Ford, he met Hollywood heroin addicts and, upon being cured and released, began to party with them. He overdosed and died.)
The HBO show is a mixture of lifestyle and construction challenge, but I think it is worth watching to see what happens when half of the fine craftspeople of Florida come together in one place. I learned about the High Point Market, a furniture trade show that takes up 10 million square feet. Also, that the decorator chose red as a pool table felt, not tournament blue. Sometimes style is more important than function!
Sadly, the house was built right next to a big lake and not too many feet above the lake. It’s not within a FEMA flood zone, but the lake itself and shores are flagged as “Zone AE” with a 1 percent annual flood risk. Hurricane Ian was purportedly a 500-year flood event and Versailles flooded (TMZ).
Fired Googlers: How about a system that returns the FEMA flood zone, not just a map, in response to an address? ChatGPT is useless:
A year ago, my husband and three children got on an airplane, moved to Florida and never looked back. Our move had made the news. I’m a columnist at New York’s storied newspaper, the New York Post, but more than that I had long been New York’s greatest champion.
(When a journalist does something that millions of others have already done, it is news.)
We got a vacation rental in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, an area we hadn’t heard of before, and enrolled our three children in the local public school.
They were our neighbors to the south! Palm Beach Gardens (PBG) is across the main road from our MacArthur Foundation-built development (in Jupiter). PBG has a beautiful county-run park with a dozen soccer fields, clay tennis courts, pickleball courts, a 2-story country club-grade tennis clubhouse, a shaded playground with water, and clean public restrooms (try finding those in NY!). PBG also has a fake downtown/New Urbanism community called Alton that we rejected due to lack of green space, but we were there the other day at Panera, Pet Smart, and Home Depot and found a husky/wolf hybrid:
This animal would be illegal to possess in Maskachusetts, but was legally bred in Ocala, Florida and after some unfortunate incidents with cats, three stays in a shelter, and two previous adoptive homes, now lives with her forever parents in PBG. She was greedy for belly rubs from our 7-year-old.
Our heroic journalist returned to New York, presumably having heard that “COVID is over” and “there were no lockdowns” (one Manhattan-based friend now simply denies that New York was ever subject to any restrictions; schools were not closed, people were not prevented from gathering or working, nobody was ordered to wear a mask, his son loved being home for more than a year (this simultaneous with the son talking about the horrors of his time in lockdown)):
Schools did open for full-time learning in fall of 2021. But masks were required, even outside, even though Dr. Anthony Fauci himself had said that was unnecessary. My kids ate lunch on the ground outdoors, urged to mask between bites, while the elderly Gov. Hochul traipsed the state, maskless, eating as a normal person living a normal life.
Our youngest was falling behind academically. The mask was stunting his verbal skills. He was hard to understand and was having trouble understanding his teacher.
In November of 2021, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was photographed maskless indoors. In her defense she tweeted “I wear a mask most of the time indoors. We took them off as people were having a hard time hearing us.”
Her departure was cheered by the New York governor:
We made the decision in late November of 2021 and by early January we were on a plane to Florida. We landed in our short-term rental and the kids started school, maskless, for the second half of the school year. We were done. We are free. A few months later Gov. Hochul would urge Republican New Yorkers to “jump on a bus and head down to Florida.” She included the dig that they’re not New Yorkers.
I agree with Governor Hochul. Cultures evolve and a critical part of 21st century New York culture is eager compliance with whatever politicians and public health officials order as well as agreement that the order is compelled by Science and that anyone who disagrees with stupid and irrational.
A question I get asked a lot is if I have any regrets about the move “now that COVID is over.” New York continues to have COVID restrictions aimed specifically at children.
My sons’ Brooklyn public school continues to do all of their school events outdoors. A recent one was held while it was 45 degrees.
Parents who haven’t been vaccinated for COVID-19 are not allowed inside the school buildings.
It’s 2023, we know the vaccine doesn’t control spread, and yet some parents haven’t been inside their kid’s classroom since 2020. It’s madness and it continues.
Not everyone I hear from is fully happy with their move. Some aren’t sure they landed in the right place. But I have yet to hear from anyone who is going back.
The great majority of people who contact me are like us: full of gratitude and happiness that we got to sanity, to safety, to normalcy. We’ll always love New York and wish for it to return to its former glory. But we’ll do that wishing from the Sunshine State that has become our family’s home.
On January 3rd our family will celebrate one year as Floridians. The concept is similar. Pursue freedom and celebrate where you find it.
We’ve met quite a few lockdown refugees during our 1.5 years in Florida. All have enough money to live in any part of the U.S. As Ms. Markowicz found, none of them have talked about wanting to return to a slave state. In fact, none have talked about leaving South Florida. We did lose a young friend, originally from Pennsylvania, to a town 30 minutes south because it is closer to her job.
The hotter the climate, the more people seem to love traditional Christmas decoration. Here are some neighbors’ houses. This one was fully up and running on November 23. Based on the lights 70′ above the ground in the palm trees, I’m going to guess that it was done by professionals with a lift.
Another photo from the same night:
You can’t truly appreciate it without the music.
A few days later…
Merry Christmas to everyone!
And… for those who are practicing Jewcraft (at the local CVS):
That day [in 2002], [Masahiko] Kimura, who was then in his sixties, was working on an Ezo spruce with a spiky, half-dead trunk which was estimated to be a thousand years old. A photographer from the Japanese magazine Kindai Bonsai was present to document the process. Neil and the other visitors observed as Kimura, with the help of his lead apprentice, Taiga Urushibata, used guy wires and a piece of rebar to bend the trunk downward, compressing the tree—an act requiring a phenomenal balance of strength and finesse. Kimura misted the branches with water and wrapped them with thick copper wire. He then bent the branches—some slightly upward, some downward—arranging the foliage into an imperfect dome, with small windows of light spaced throughout the greenery. He worked with relentless focus, but what amazed Neil most was the synchronicity of Kimura and Urushibata: whenever Kimura needed a tool, he would wordlessly extend his hand, and Urushibata would have the implement waiting for him.
“So you want to apprentice here?” Urushibata said.
“I do,” Neil said.
“You should reconsider,” Urushibata said, then turned his attention back to the spruce.
How did Kimura become a legendary master?
Kimura is sometimes said to have done for bonsai what Picasso did for painting—he shattered the art form and then reëngineered it. Using power tools, he performed transformations so drastic that the resulting shapes seemed almost impossible. Moreover, his new methods allowed him to execute dramatic alterations in hours as opposed to over decades. Not surprisingly, his accelerated technique was admired and imitated throughout the West.
Masahiko Kimura was eleven years old when his father, a successful engineer, died suddenly.
Kimura apprenticed from age 15 to 26 and did not become a full-time bonsai artist until his late 30s.
Around this time, a thirty-year-old engineer working at Toyota named Takeo Kawabe visited Kimura’s bonsai garden, fell in love with the trees, and asked to become his apprentice. Together, they developed an arsenal of custom devices—sandblasters, small chainsaws, grinders—that made it easy to quickly shape deadwood into whorls and wisps. Using power tools, Kimura could hollow out thick roots, allowing him to coil them up in smaller pots; he could also bend stout trees, to make them appear smaller, or split them apart, to create forest-style plantings.
Everything is bigger and better now:
Of late, the fashion in bonsai has shifted to larger specimens, to accommodate the tastes of wealthy Chinese buyers, who display their prized trees in outdoor gardens rather than inside their homes, as Japanese people do. Kimura’s work, which is monumental by bonsai standards—some trees reached as high as my sternum, with trunks nearly as wide as my waist—was well suited to this trend, and he had profited greatly from it. He told me that he had recently sold a tree to the C.E.O. of a major Chinese tech company. “To them, a million dollars is like a pack of cigarettes,” he said.
The former apprentice rejects his master’s core innovation:
Neil pointedly avoids power tools; he never grinds or sandblasts. This leaves the grain with a nuanced texture laden with spidery fissures. When you lean in close to a classic Kimura tree, in each carefully sculpted curve of the deadwood you perceive the handiwork of the artist. When you lean in to one of Neil’s trees, you marvel at the handiwork of nature.
How does being one of the world’s greatest bonsai artists compare to filling a chair at a FAANG company?
Neil, now in his early forties, had chronic back pain and was developing arthritis in his fingers. His financial situation, he told me, was “hand to mouth,” and the chaotic nature of climate change was making it harder to keep his prized trees alive. … He has been in therapy for years, attempting to root out the odd mixture of insecurity and callousness that Kimura ingrained in him. During his six years in Japan, Neil was prohibited from dating. When he returned home, he began a relationship with a former schoolmate, and they had a son, but before long they broke up, leaving him a single father with a seven-day-a-week job and perilous finances.
(If the bonsai expert doesn’t earn a lot of money, the mother made the economically rational choice under Oregon family law to leave him with the child. Separately, the above phrase “they had a son” is ambiguous in modern American English. Does it mean that a pair of hetereosexual adults working together produced a son? Or that a non-binary solo adult (“they”) produced a miniature human?)
I won’t be investing $10,000-20,000 in one of Neil’s creations. This is partly because I don’t want to kill a $10,000+ tree via incompetence, but also because I don’t think the species that he works with can thrive in South Florida where they won’t experience cold weather (article that says cold weather/dormancy is essential for temperate species). Florida does have its share of bonsai artistry and commercial bonsai production, but the popular species are adapted to the subtropics. Heathcote Botanical Gardens in Fort Pierce has a substantial collection that was developed by James J. Smith. Here are some photos from an October visit:
Another favorite place is Robert Pinder’s Dragon Tree Bonsai just west of Stuart, Florida. The most interesting stuff is not for sale, but can be enjoyed. A more commercial operation, which can be a good source for supplies such as stone lanterns, is H&F Imports, a.k.a. Sunshine Tropical Gardens, in Davie, Florida.
One nice thing about Florida is that keeping a bonsai in the back yard can be done with zero effort. Just place them where the HOA’s sprinklers will hit them (with “reclaimed water”; maybe best not to ask where this comes from) and Nature takes care of the rest. I did move ours under an alcove for overnight shelter from Hurricane Nicole.
Due to the death of democracy and the success of fascism, the Tyrant of Tallahassee continues to govern Florida. What if Ron DeSantis wants to be El Presidente? I’m not sure that he can do it unless he changes some of his harsh ways. The majority of Americans are indifferent to whether a politician is senile and incompetent so long as he/she/ze/they appears to possess “empathy.” The peasantry thinks that a politician who feigns concern for the peasants will implement policies that help the peasants (central planning always favored over the market, therefore, because only central plans carry explicit intentions).
Ron DeSantis has been highly competent, e.g., supervising the response to Hurricane Ian so that the barrier island bridges were restored within weeks and electric power, which he’d been working on for years, bounced back even sooner. But he can also be kind of mean, which is the opposite of empathy. I cringed when he talked about looters being shot. “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ focus on ‘looting’ causes outrage” (Orlando Weekly):
We go through this with every storm. Nobody wants your waterlogged electronics and soggy couch.
“We want to make sure we maintain law and order,” said DeSantis, before floating the idea that thieves are taking boats into damaged areas to steal from flooded homes. “You can have people bringing boats into some of these islands… I would not want to chance that if I were you, given we’re a Second Amendment state.”
Wouldn’t it have been sufficient for him to say, only if asked, “Florida has a lot of great police departments and a tradition of public order. Also, there are plenty of armed citizens.”? As the article cited above notes, there aren’t a lot of great looting opportunities in flooded neighborhoods.
We also have the debacle of a government that can’t figure out who is eligible to vote and therefore must rely on what potentially confused residents say. Ron DeSantis could express empathy for those who couldn’t figure out whether they were entitled to vote instead of prosecuting them. See “Florida voter has election fraud charges touted by DeSantis dismissed” (ABC):
A Florida man had his election fraud charges dismissed on Friday, making him the first of 20 people who Gov. Ron DeSantis announced had been charged with voter fraud in August, to beat his case.
Robert Lee Wood, who faced one count of making a false affirmation on a voter application, and one count of voting as an unqualified elector, had his charges dismissed on the grounds that the prosecutor lacked appropriate jurisdiction.
Wood was facing up to five years in prison and $5,000 in fines and fees, for allegedly illegally voting in the 2020 election.
When the charges were announced on Aug. 18, DeSantis said at a press conference that local prosecutors had been “loath” to take up election fraud cases.
“Now we have the ability with the attorney general and statewide prosecutor to bring those [cases] on behalf of the state of Florida,” he said.
But a judge found on Friday that the statewide prosecutor did not have jurisdiction over one case in Miami. Statewide prosecutors, which are an extension of the Attorney General’s office, are prosecuting all of the election fraud cases that were brought in August.
That includes Wood, who was charged with second-degree murder in 1991. Wood registered to vote in 2020 after being approached by a voter rights advocate at a grocery store. Wood claimed he did not fill out the form, rather he just signed it, according to the affidavit of arrest filled out by an FDLE agent.
The form includes a section which asks the applicant to either verify that they are not a felon, or if so, to declare that their right to vote had been restored.
Voter rights advocates say that provision is especially confusing because of the passage of Amendment 4 to the Florida Constitution in 2018, which restored all felons their rights to vote except for those convicted of sex felonies or murder charges.
Later, another condition was added requiring voters with felonies to pay off their fines and fees before having their rights restored.
In a state of 22 million people, prosecuting 20 people for improperly voting is unlikely to change any election outcome, even if hundreds more are motivated to read the fine print. So, in my view, all that the prosecutions do is make DeSantis appear to lack empathy. Convicted murderers might not be “the best people” as Donald Trump would put it and maybe we don’t want them voting (though I would rather exclude those who’ve had their student loans forgiven and haven’t yet worked for at least 8 years and let convicted felons vote! Convicted felons at least know a lot about prison and criminal justice system) but we can still express empathy towards them.
I don’t think that DeSantis can become president if he continues on this track. The migrant flights to sanctuary states and cities can work because they show true empathy for the migrants (wanting to see them loved and cared for by “In this house we believe…” signers in Maskachusetts, for example). But some of the stuff that DeSantis says and does seems gratuitously mean and/or could be improved hugely by a change in tone.
Americans generally affirmed the idea that the country will be better with bigger government and higher taxes. Whether this is true or false, Florida’s prosperity primarily depends on the differential between Florida and other states, not the absolute quality of life in Florida. It is a bit like the ancient story of two non-binary campers:
Kendall and Arden are camping when a thin-looking brown bear approaches they/them and them/they, growling.
Kendall starts putting on their running shoes.
Arden says, “What are you doing? We don’t need to bring in Ketanji’s panel of biologists to know that, regardless of your pronouns, you can’t outrun a bear!”
Kendall says, “I don’t have to outrun the bear—I just have to outrun you!”
State governments became vastly more powerful in 2020, e.g., deciding whether residents of a state would be able to leave their homes, send children to school, work for a living, avoid the injection of their children with an experimental medicine designed to help 80-year-olds. An interstate move to switch overlords is therefore much more likely than when the state-to-state difference was a few dollars in tax.
Democrats kept control of New York State. Kathy Hochul would need to order a lockdown or two in order match what Florida Realtor of the Year 2020 Andrew Cuomo achieved, but her victory is an important precondition in keeping people who value liberty pointed south on Interstate 95 to their new homes in the Florida Free State (TM). I also appreciate her teaching young Puerto Ricans that rules established by elites may not apply to elites…
Two white women try to learn the native dances of an exotic tribe of diminutive masked humans. https://t.co/EqcbUvgJo0
Colorado moved away from its flat tax by limiting deductions for those earning more than $300,000 per year. That’s not a huge nudge toward Florida, but it is a nudge. San Francisco added a tax on condos owned by rich people who leave them vacant for 183 days per year or more (53/47 vote; a mystery that it could have been that close given that hardly any voters own a condo that would be subject to this tax).
The governor’s race in Texas was the biggest disappointment for realtors in Florida. A Beto victory carried with it the prospect of rich Californians choosing Florida rather than Texas as their escape-from-Newsom destination. The silver living is that Greg Abbott’s victory was only 55/44 (compare to 56/42 in 2018 and 59/39 in 2014). Given the propensity of today’s young people to support progressive politics and the overall national trend towards bigger government, it seems likely that Texas will eventually be governed by Democrats, a huge boost to Florida’s chances of capturing fleeing successful Californians. Maybe Texas is safe from California-style government today, but people who go to the effort of moving are also interested in what a state will be like in 10-20 years.
An exchange on Facebook with one of those successful Californias who praised a college that doesn’t discriminate on the basis of skin color:
I wish my own kids were brave, and principled, and original thinking enough to consider applying instead of conforming to conventional wisdom and stupid rankings. I’ll keep trying to teach them.
But your kids have watched you conform. California politicians took away your liberties one by one starting in March 2020 and you simply stayed in California, right? And, in fact, your kids watch you pay taxes to fund all of it.
I have 2 kids I can’t move away from [California family law gave his wife millions of reason to sue him…]. But in 2 years when #2 goes to college I’ll have a lot more altitude to go elsewhere. FL is too far away and TX is too close to purple. UT is the current front runner.
The guy believes that Texas is just a few young voters away from Following the Science into lockdowns, mask orders, vaccine papers checks, etc., and maybe a new personal income tax to pay for it all! (Beto promised to use Science to protect Texans from viral threats. In fairness, so did Abbott, but he interpreted Science’s whispers differently.)
There was great news in Michigan. Lockdown Democrat Gretchen Whitmer was reelected 54/44, a clear indication that nothing is going to change in Michigan. People who don’t love the government there should move away. Wisconsin (a paradise for child support profiteers) similar reelected a Democrat governor. Pennsylvania is a great source of new residents with money for Florida. A Democrat won there by a large margin (56/42). Again, people who don’t want to be ruled by Democrats have only one realistic option: move. And once the decision to move is made, Florida is there and ready with jobs, low taxes, all-year outdoor recreation, etc.
Maine and Kansas also reelected Democrats as governors.
A Democrat victory at the Federal level should drive additional moves to Florida. A person who wants his/her/zir/their state to resist new takeovers of power by Washington, D.C. will find that in Florida, the state in which Joe Biden’s order that travelers wear masks on airplanes was found unconstitutional. A person who wants to maintain his/her/zir/their spending power in the face of Federal income tax rate increases can probably do so by moving from a medium-to-high-tax state to a state with no personal income tax and some reasonable assurance that the electorate won’t amend the constitution to impose one. That’s Florida, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Tennessee? New Hampshire actually does have an income tax (not on wages, but on dividends and interest). Texas is at risk over time of having everything that California has (see above).
What about politics here in Florida? First, the election results were available on the timeline that taxpayers expected:
Just a reminder that Florida held an election, tabulated the votes in all 67 counties before the end of the day and prepared for an oncoming Hurricane; all at the same time.
(Hurricane Nicole arrived on the SE coast roughly 24 hours after the polls closed.)
The stealth scheme to raise pay for the Praetorian Guard (see Florida comes up with a scheme for increasing taxes on private workers via a property tax exemption for government workers) was approved by a majority of voters, but not above the 60 percent threshold necessary to amend the Florida constitution. Voters here in majority-Democrat Palm Beach County approved $200 million in borrowing to fund “workforce housing”. Americans everywhere believe “when the market gives you an answer you don’t like, declare market failure”. There are approximately 1.5 million people in Palm Beach County. How $200 million, the price of a couple of teardown houses in Palm Beach itself, is going to change the affordability of housing for the average person here is unclear. It looks like it will at least make a huge difference for some government cronies. From a “quick summary”:
Some non-profit and government workers will get paid. Some favored developers will get rich off the spread between the market rate for interest and this slush fund.
If the typical unit holds 2 people, that’s 2,200 people who are being housed after 16 years of government and non-profit employees being paid. That’s roughly 0.15% of the people who live in Palm Beach County (1 out of every 700).
Which of the 1 in 700 people in Palm Beach County gets to live a subsidized life?
In other words, anyone whom the non-profit folks think is deserving!
Even in majority-Democrat Palm Beach County, the all-abortion-care-all-the-time Democrat running against the Tyrant of Tallahassee could not prevail. Ron DeSantis won by 51/48 here in the county (compare to 60/40 statewide).
In Democrats love elderly white guys, Florida edition (August 24), I predicted a 56:44 victory for Ron DeSantis in yesterday’s election. Ray, in the comments, predicted a 6 percent margin for DeSantis. How did we do?
The voters, including all of the new ones driven into Florida by Andrew Cuomo and other Lockdown Governors, have spoken. The all-abortion-care-all-the-time campaign of Charlie Crist resonated with only 40 percent of Floridians whose votes were not suppressed. NYT:
Ron DeSantis won by 1.5 million votes, a big improvement over the 50,000-vote margin he had in 2018 over Andrew Gillum.
Charlie Crist gave a “good congratulations to Governor DeSantis on his re-election” (YouTube). Prior to the election, Crist characterized DeSantis as a “fascist” who would “end democracy” in Florida. Is he talking about about the same Ron DeSantis?
The company has also been in the news after the same legislature passed a law undoing the company’s ability to run its own county, the Reedy Creek Improvement District (WPTV). Democrats in Massachusetts and California have been predicting that this will be disastrous for ordinary taxpayers in Florida, who will be on the hook for the $1 billion that Reedy Creek has borrowed (applying the general principle that people in Florida are too stupid not to understand their own interests).
First, why did Disney want to have its own county?
To pay for the infrastructure throughout the property—such as roads, sewer systems, and water lines—the Reedy Creek Improvement District sold federally subsidized tax-exempt municipal bonds.
Florida did not have a personal income tax at the time (nor does it now). Therefore, allowing Disney to borrow money tax-free did not cost Florida anything. The Federal income tax rates hit 50 percent at $22,000 per year and 70 percent at $100,000 per year, so Disney would have been able to borrow at a substantial savings compared to if the company had to issue conventional taxable corporate bonds (see discussion in the comments about whether a 50 percent tax rate implies that a muni can be sold at half the yield of a same-risk same-duration corporate bond).
How could the arrangement be justified? If it is that easy, why not have the Florida state government give every company a 1-foot-square county-like “district” to administer and then the company can use its district to issue tax-exempt bonds? Disney told the legislature that the planned primary use for the 27,000 acres it had purchased was a town: Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). Walt in 1966:
But the most exciting, by far the most important part of our Florida project—in fact, the heart of everything we’ll be doing in Disney World—will be our experimental prototype city of tomorrow. We call it E.P.C.O.T. spelled E-P-C-O-T: Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Here it is in larger scale.
No city of today will serve as the guide for the city of tomorrow. E.P.C.O.T. will be a planned environment demonstrating to the world what American communities can accomplish through proper control of planning and design.
E.P.C.O.T. begins with an idea new among cities built since the birth of the automobile. We call it the radial plan. Picture a wheel: like the spokes of a wheel, the city fans out along a series of radials from a bustling hub at the center of E.P.C.O.T. A network of transportation systems radiate from the central hub carrying people to and from the heart of the city. These transportation systems circulate to and through four primary spheres of activity surrounding the central core. First, the area of business and commerce … next, the high-density apartment housing … then the broad greenbelt and recreation lands … and finally the low-density, neighborhood residential streets. E.P.C.O.T.’s dynamic urban center will offer the excitement and variety of activities found only in the metropolitan cities: cultural, social, business, and entertainment.
Among its major features will be a cosmopolitan hotel and convention center towering thirty or more stories. Shopping areas where stores and whole streets recreate the character and adventure of places ‘round the world … theaters for dramatic and musical productions … restaurants and a variety of nightlife attractions. And a wide range of office buildings, some containing services required by E.P.C.O.T.’s residents, but most of them designed especially to suit local and regional needs of major corporations. But most important, this entire fifty acres of city streets and buildings will be completely enclosed. In this climate-controlled environment, shoppers, theatergoers, and people just out for a stroll will enjoy ideal weather conditions, protected day and night from rain, heat and cold, and humidity.
Here the pedestrian will be king, free to walk and browse without fear of motorized vehicles. Only electric powered vehicles will travel above the streets of E.P.C.O.T.’s central city.
One of the ideas was a three-level road system. Trucks on the bottom. Cars in the middle. Pedestrians, bicycles, and electric golf carts on the top. There would be a “greenbelt” around the high-rise offices and apartment buildings. Beyond the greenbelt would be single-family homes. At least 20,000 people, which was a substantial number in a time before mass immigration, would live in E.P.C.O.T.
Since it would be primarily a municipality, in other words, it made sense for Disney to have the right to issue tax-free muni bonds.
An unrelated tidbit of potential interest is that two of the principal managers for getting Disney World ready for visitors were MIT graduates.
General Joe Potter (birth name William Potter, nickname Joe) was an integral part of the early team working on the Florida land acquisition and helped with the legislation to form the RCID.
A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in civil engineering, General Joe was a logistics planner for the invasion of Normandy and commanded the troop section of the Propaganda and Psychological Warfare Division during World War II.
Potter worked behind the scenes, overseeing the construction of the park’s infrastructure, which included underground utilities, a sewer system, and a power grid, along with water treatment plants and land reclamation measures. The other Joe, Rear Admiral Joseph W. Fowler, was at the helm of just about everything else Potter wasn’t handling, including the creation of the theme park itself, the hotels, transportation, and the like. Admiral Fowler had graduated second in his class from the US Naval Academy in 1917. Like General Potter, Fowler was also a graduate of MIT, with a master’s degree in naval architecture.
What was the land worth before Disney showed up? Somewhere between $45 and $150 per acre (950 in 2022 Bidies). By keeping its plans secret, the company paid roughly $200 per acre to buy up 43 square miles of land (2X the size of Manhattan and similar to San Francisco, but without all of the homeless encampments). As soon as word leaked out to the media, “land prices in the area skyrocketed to over $1,000 an acre.” (Disney paid $7,000 an acre in 2019 for 1,600 additional acres of swap.)
The prices on opening day in 1971?
General Admission: adult admission, $3.50; junior admission, ages twelve through seventeen, $2.50; and children three through eleven, $1.00. If you felt the need to bring man’s best friend, your four-legged friend could stay at the Disney kennel for fifty cents a day, which included a lunch. The cost of individual attractions ranged from ten cents to ninety cents. … you could spend the night at the Polynesian Village or the Contemporary for $25.00 to $44.00 a night at either hotel.
The book notes that in 2010, Disney actually did build a handful of houses inside Disney World: Golden Oak. Right now they seem to be selling for about $1,000 per square foot. A few hundred people live there, but presumably anyone with $5-20 million to spend on a house will also have additional houses in which to live.
Circling back to the original topic, Disney was able to cut its costs tremendously at the expense of the average Federal taxpayer. What’s curious is that DeSantis-hating folks in other states who’ve been paying Disney’s tax bills advocate for this arrangement to continue. They’re so against DeSantis that they’re in favor of corporate welfare that actually costs them personally (since if people who buy Disney World (“Reedy Creek”) bonds don’t have to pay tax on the interest, taxes necessary to run the Federal government will have to be extracted from ordinary schlubs) and if you ask them “How much longer do you think Disney should have the right to issue tax-free municipal bonds?” they don’t propose any end date.
(I still can’t figure out how President Biden’s first executive order wasn’t shutting down all U.S. theme parks. Schools were still closed in many big U.S. cities when Biden took office. Why allow daily superspreader operations if it was too dangerous to run schools New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc.?)
A “yes” supports authorizing the Florida State Legislature to provide an additional homestead property tax exemption on $50,000 of assessed value on property owned by certain public service workers including teachers, law enforcement officers, emergency medical personnel, active duty members of the military and Florida National Guard, and child welfare service employees.
I wonder if this will catch on nationwide as a stealth way to increase the amount of money that flows from those who aren’t part of the government to those who are. Instead of increasing property tax rates and then giving government workers a raise, which would be readily noticed, the scheme gives government workers a boost in spending power by relieving them of paying property taxes (to at least some extent). Note that this only helps government workers who are rich enough to own houses. Landlords who rent to government workers won’t get a property tax reduction so government workers who rent, like our local friend who is a police officer for a city down the coast, won’t get a rent reduction.
This could be expanded so that when government workers purchase items at retail they don’t have to pay sales tax (there is typically already a mechanism for sales tax exemption for resale, non-profit orgs, etc.).
Separately, the local police officer renter is an interesting example of someone who benefits from open borders. Without all of the crime committed in a Haitian immigrant neighborhood, the seaside city where she works wouldn’t have needed or wanted to hire additional police officers.
One powerful obsession has been that a former leader will break out from his island exile and become an absolute ruler once again. I’m talking, of course, about Napoleon on Elba, which was indeed followed by a brief return to power (he was 46 years old at the time).
We face a somewhat analogous situation today. Donald Trump is mostly confined to the island of Palm Beach. It is common for people to express fears regarding the potential for Trump to return to power starting in January 2025 (when Trump will be a little older than 46…).
“Palm Beach” is frequently confused with the city directly across from the ritzy island (where a teardown can cost $110 million). The city has the airport, the office buildings, most of the housing (12X the population), the government offices for “Palm Beach County”, etc. It has the confusing name of “West Palm Beach”.
What about renaming the island that is home to the exiled ruler “Elba” and then we can just use “Palm Beach” to refer to the city and the region?
