Poor and Homeless in the Sunshine State

Down and Out in Theme Park Nation

James Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351498036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

A place like Orlando, Florida is not transformed from swampland to sprawling metropolis through Peter Pan-like flights of fancy, but through theme park expansions requiring developmental schemes that are tough minded and often worsen relationships between the wealthy and the poor. The homeless arrive with their own hopes and illusions, which are soon shattered. The rest of the local population makes its peace with the system. Meanwhile the homeless are reduced to advocacy models that neither middle- nor working-class folks much worry about. They are modern members of Ellison's "invisible men" but they comprise a racial and social mixture unlike any other in the American landscape.This book is primarily about the dark side of this portrait the poor, near-poor, homeless, and dispossessed who live in the midst of this verdant landscape. The phrase "down and out, " has been used to describe people who are destitute or penniless since the late nineteenth century. Here the term is used in a more expansive sense, as synonymous with anyone who lives near, at, or over the edge of financial catastrophe.

1

In the Shadow of the Mouse:
Central Florida as Myth, Metaphor,
and Reality

October 1, 1971, the day Walt Disney World opened, was a signal day in the history of Central Florida. The opening was the culmination of eight years of legal machinations, land acquisition, engineering (or as we now say, “imagineering”), and construction. In those eight years, Disney purchased, mostly through dummy corporations, 27,400 acres of land (about forty-three square miles) in the southwestern part of Orange County, Florida. Once Disney World opened, Orange County and its principal city, Orlando, were transformed, more or less instantly, from a regional backwater economy based largely on citrus, cotton, and cattle into a major national and international tourist destination. Today, nearly fifty million people visit one of the Disney theme parks each year. With total employment near 66,000 employees, Walt Disney World in Orlando is the largest single-site employer in the United States (Koenig 2007; Foglesong 2003).

Disney was soon followed by a succession of other Orlando-area theme parks and tourist attractions (“like bees to honey,” as Foglesong [2003: 3] puts it): Sea World, Universal Studios, Busch Gardens (in Tampa), the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex, the Holy Land Experience (a Biblically-themed attraction). These are the survivors, the parks and attractions that are still with us. Quite a number of others have come and gone: Circus World (opened 1973, closed 1986); Splendid China (opened 1993, closed 2003); Boardwalk and Baseball (opened 1987, closed 1990); the Guinness World Record Experience (opened 2000, closed 2002); Stars Hall of Fame (opened 1975, closed 1984), and on through quite a list.¹ To all the above, add scores of water parks, miniature golf courses, bowling alleys, wax museums, dinner theaters and related “attractions,” plus all the hotels and motels required to house the influx of tourists, plus all the restaurants to feed them once their frolics are over, plus all the rental car agencies so visitors could get from airport to hotel to theme park and back again, plus all the churches where the pious could seek redemption for their theme-park excesses, plus all the roads and highways necessary to connect the dots and you end up with a pretty big chunk of economic activity. A wag once remarked that the entire post-1971 economy of Central Florida seems to have developed solely to provide an answer to the question, “So, what are we going to do the day after we do Disney?” To a significant extent, that remains the major economic driver in the region.

Disney itself has also expanded dramatically since the Magic Kingdom opened in 1971. In the years since, the mega-park has added Epcot Center (1982), Typhoon Lagoon, the first of what are now several on-property water parks (1988), MGM Studios (1989), Pleasure Island and Downtown Disney (1989), the Disney Wide World of Sports complex, complete with baseball diamonds, a track-and-field venue, and tennis facilities, the Richard Petty Driving Experience on Disney’s own mile and a half race track (1997), and the fourth complete theme park, Animal Kingdom (1998), along with numerous resort hotels. Between the four theme parks, multiple water parks, assorted miniature golf courses, regular golf courses, movies theaters, restaurants, and countless other activities and attractions, the Disney visitor need never leave “the property,” and in fact is encouraged not to do so. One thing you absolutely cannot do at Walt Disney World is rent a car that you could use to get somewhere else.

Disney-related tourism and employment stimulated rapid population growth. In 1950, Orlando was a sleepy little city of 52,000 people. By 1970, just before Disney’s opening, it was nearly 100,000 people. Growth thereafter was steady and predictable: 128,000 by 1980, 165,000 in 1990, and almost 230,000 by 2007. Growth in the surrounding county was sharper still: a mere 115,000 in 1950 and well more than a million today. Between 1990 and 2000, the Orange County population grew at a rate of 32.3 percent, the fastest growing county in Florida and one of the fastest growing in the entire nation (data from the U.S. Census Bureau, various years).

Population growth at this rate and scale demands housing and infrastructure—lots of it, in a hurry. Regional developers were quick to respond and very rapidly created a booming secondary economy based on construction—homes to house new arrivals, strip malls to cater to their needs, schools to educate their children, and highways, streets and roads to get everyone from place to place. Tourism and construction soon became the new base of the Orlando regional economy, displacing the orange groves, cotton fields, and cattle ranches that had previously been the region’s economic life blood.

Central Florida as Myth

“When people tell the story of Orlando’s stunning transformation from swamp and sinkhole to 21st century metropolis, they begin, inevitably, with the man and the mouse. The mouse is Mickey, the man Walt Disney” (Allman 2007: 1). And surely, it is Walt and Mickey and all they created that have given us the myth of Central Florida, a myth whose central theme is “The Happiest Place on Earth.”

The Happiest Place on Earth (originally a marketing slogan developed for Disneyland in Southern California, but now used to describe all things Disney) is by no means the only slogan to have been used in marketing Disney’s brand over the years. At the various Disney installations around the world, for instance, 2006 was the Year of a Million Dreams. (Interestingly, the Year of a Million Dreams promotion began October 1, 2006 and ended December 31, 2008—so it was about twenty-six months of a million dreams, but never mind.) Other park slogans have included Where Dreams Come True, Where Friends Share the Magic, Where the Party Never Ends, and Where the Magic Began, but none of these have the immediate appeal or the staying power of the Happiest Place on Earth.²

The Happiest Place on Earth would be a tall order for any community, what with crime, pollution, poverty, homelessness, and all, but in Central Florida, the Happiest Place on Earth is just the beginning. The region’s principal city, Orlando, is the City Beautiful and Florida itself is the Sunshine State. Happy people, beautiful city, warm sunshine—Eden on Earth! Add in a big helping of magnificent sprawling homes near verdant rolling golf courses in spectacular gated communities with screened-in swimming pools in every backyard and it is easy to understand why the region has been among the fastest growing in the nation for years. In a focus group we did in Osceola County in 2008 (the southern-most of the counties in the Central Florida region which abuts Disney’s property), one local referred to the region’s drawing power as “Pixie Dust.” When asked to explain, our participant remarked that people come to Central Florida on vacation, become enchanted with their Disney experience to the point where they come to believe that Disney life is Central Florida’s real life, then uproot themselves and move to the region only to discover that it is all a mirage—a wonderful, upbeat, glorious fantasy enjoyed by children of all ages, but a fantasy nonetheless.

Regional planners and policy-makers, perhaps taking the Central Florida myth a bit too literally, assumed until quite recently that the area’s unparalleled growth would continue forever, and with it, presumably, the economic boom times that growth propels. As Andrew Ross (1999) has said, “Keep the World Coming to Florida” has forever been the state’s calling card. A much-discussed local planning report, known as the “How Shall We Grow?” report (originally released in 2007), projected a population of 2,162,000 in Orange County by 2030, and a total regional (seven-county) population of just over seven million.³ The planning problem, basically, was where to house and how to transport all those people and the economic activity they would generate over the next twenty-five years. The thought that the Happy, Beautiful, Sunny Central Florida Growth Machine (Molotch 1976) might grind to a halt seems not to have occurred to anyone until quite recently.

Nearly all the region’s movers and shakers, then and now, have been consumed by the Disney-esque vision: “To all who come to this happy place: welcome … . Here age relives fond memories of the past … and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.” This is a passage from Walt Disney’s dedication speech at Disneyland in Anaheim, CA, July, 1955, but could just as easily stand as Central Florida’s regional anthem, something one can easily imagine Orlando’s fifth-grade boys and girls solemnly reciting during their morning devotionals.

The apotheosis of the myth of Central Florida is the Disney-inspired, Disney-owned, Disney-built town of Celebration, just south of Walt Disney World and clearly built to give Central Floridians the opportunity “of living, and dying, on Disney land” (Ross 1999: 2). Persons accustomed to conventional urban or even suburban living would describe Celebration as a small town that looks and feels like it was sent up from Central Casting. Built on the principles of the New Urbanism appropriately Imagineered, Celebration consists of about 1100 prim houses and townhomes all neatly arranged on broad boulevards that sweep gracefully to Celebration Place, a hundred-acre “business district” that houses the town’s commercial enterprises, all of them within an easy walk of every occupied home—and most of them, frankly, useless to average Celebration homeowners who complain that they have a very convenient monogramming store right downtown (Confetti, “a full service monogramming store”), a Lollipop Cottage (children’s designer clothing boutique), numerous galleries and frame shops, and even a gourmet food store, but no Target, no large supermarket, not even a Home Depot, none of these being quite cute enough to warrant space in downtown Celebration. That the place was devised by the guy who originally thought up Never Never Land says a great deal, as does the town’s official slogan: “You’ve got to see this place!” Indeed, you do—as Ross (1999), Frantz and Collings (2000), Mannheim (2003) and many other Celebration commentators make clear.

One story that circulates about Celebration is that when homes there first went up for sale (the original homebuyers were chosen by lottery, incidentally), the developers hired young boys to sit by the central lake (an artificial lake, of course) with fishing poles in hand and lines in the water, just to drive home the Norman Rockwellian serenity and nostalgia that residents could expect to encounter there. Whether this is true or not is hardly the point. It surely could be true, and that says everything that needs to be said. Another story, definitely true, is that there is a restriction in every deed stipulating that the owner must pay a monthly fee to the official landscape maintenance company, Celebration’s way of assuring that all adjacent lawns are mowed at the same time and to the same height to prevent any unsightly yard-to-yard variation in grass length. (True!) House colors are chosen from a common palette; landscape plantings must be approved by a central landscape planning committee. It certainly wouldn’t do—not in Celebration, anyway—for the roses in front of one house to clash with the gladiolus in front of another.

Census 2000 data on Celebration reveal it to be, as expected, a small homogeneous town of 2700 people living in 1100 housing units, 94 percent of the residents white, 96 percent of them not poor. In 2000, the median value of single-family owner occupied homes was just under $400,000 and the median annual family income was just less than $100,000 (about twice the U.S. average at that time). Happy, beautiful, sunny—and well-to-do and white.

Nothing expresses the myth of Central Florida quite so poignantly as the lyrics to the Disney classic, “When You Wish Upon a Star.” The song was introduced in the 1940 Disney movie Pinocchio and is sung by Jiminy Cricket over the opening credits and in the film’s final scene. For those whose recall of Disney trivia is uncertain, the lyrics follow:

When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you

If your heart is in your dream
No request is too extreme
When you wish upon a star
As dreamers do

Fate is kind
She brings to those who love
The sweet fulfillment of
Their secret longing

Like a bolt out of the blue
Fate steps in and sees you through
When you wish upon a star
Your dreams come true

Like Disney World itself and the region now so entirely engulfed in the Disney mythos, the song expresses the boundless optimism that fate (the stars) will be forever kind, that anything you need or want will come to you, that wishes and dreams make everything possible. The happiest place on earth, indeed.

Central Florida as Metaphor

Central Florida has also evolved into a metaphor for the twenty-first century post-industrial city: a vast, sprawling, congested, unplanned, overbuilt, environmentally indifferent growth machine that has created a few thousand square miles of metro-area suburbs with practically no urb at the center. The recent National Geographic article on Central Florida, “Beyond Disney” (Allman 2007: 1) describes the metaphor of Central Florida in lyrical terms:

Everything happening to America today is happening here, and it’s far removed from the cookie cutter suburbanization of life a generation ago. The Orlando region has become Exhibit A for the ascendant power of our cities’ exurbs: blobby coalescences of look-alike, overnight, amoeba-like concentrations of population far from city centers. These huge, sprawling communities are where more and more Americans choose to be, the place where job growth is fastest, home building is briskest, and malls and mega-churches are multiplying as newcomers keep on coming. Who are all these people? They’re you, they’re me.

Andrew Ross says that “the damage wrought by thirty [now forty] years of this kind of market-driven development, propelled by short-term profit and asleep-at-the-wheel planning, is painfully evident on all sides” (1999: 7). And so it is. Orlando, the region’s “central city,” has a current population of 222,000, roughly the eighty-second largest U.S. city. The Orlando Metropolitan Statistical Area, comprised of Orange, Seminole, Osceola, and Lake Counties, contains a bit more than two million people and ranks twenty-seventh among metro areas. Finally, the Orlando “urbanized area” ranks seventeenth in urban sprawl (according to data recovered at http://www.sprawlcity.org/hbis/index.html), with its two million people sprawled out over hundreds of square miles of urbanized space.

One consequence of sprawl is long commuting times and traffic congestion, especially since there is no public transportation to speak of. (There is a bus system, Lynx, but the universal perception is that the only people who ride it are people who can’t afford to own a car.) Survey after survey in the Orlando metro area documents widespread public dissatisfaction with traffic congestion. In a 2001 survey, “traffic congestion” ranked behind only public safety and health care as important regional policy issues, with similar results in numerous other studies. In a 2005 study done in our research institute for Metroplan Orlando (the region’s transportation planning agency), 58 percent said that congestion was a problem when travelling to and from work and 55 percent opined likewise when trying to shop. The local interstate, I-4, is often described, especially during rush hours, as Orlando’s largest parking lot. A 2002 study of traffic congestion in U.S. cities ranked Orlando fourteenth, with the average metro resident spending about sixty-six hours per year in traffic jams. In most years, we also rank somewhere among the top five most dangerous cities for pedestrians and bicyclists. According to a November 10, 2009, report posted on the MSNBC web page, “The Worst Cities for Walking,” Orlando was ranked as the number one “most dangerous city for pedestrians.” We break loose from the traffic jams, it seems, just long enough to run down the poor schmucks trying to get around on foot!

The exurban nature of life in and around Orlando is illustrated by some results from a poll done in our research institute in 2004. The poll focused on Orange and Seminole counties, the counties closest to Orlando, and ignored the more rural Osceola and Lake counties. One module attempted to identify why metro area residents tend not to go downtown. One question asked, “Do you and your family live in downtown Orlando, or do you live away from downtown?” Of those responding, 92 percent said they lived away from downtown, indicative of the degree of sprawl. Those 92 percent were asked, “Have you ever thought about going into downtown Orlando, say in the evening or on a weekend, but then decided not to for some reason?” Encouragingly for the central city, 61 percent said, “No, never.” (Or maybe not so encouraging, as some of this 61 percent would be people who would never think of going downtown in the first place and would therefore never have reason to reconsider.) But the remainder, four in ten, said yes, this had been their experience at least once. When asked why, the number one response was that the stores where people like to shop are in the suburbs where they live, not downtown where they don’t. The next three most frequently cited reasons were all traffic-related: they don’t want to fight the traffic; the toll roads are too expensive; parking is hard to find. These four were far more important reasons for not venturing downtown than crime, panhandlers, or homeless people (the latter depicted in the news at the time of the survey as “destroying” downtown and driving away business—when, all the while, it was traffic, parking, and congestion).

In this place of exurban, post-modern pioneers, the range of choices is vast even when the choices themselves are illusory. Here life is truly a style: You don’t want to live in a mass-produced instant community? No problem. Orlando’s developers, like the producers of instant coffee, offer you a variety of flavors. … In Orlando’s lively downtown, it’s possible to live in a loft just as you would in Chicago or New York. But these lofts are brand-new buildings constructed for those who want the postindustrial lifestyle in a place that was never industrial.

Orlando’s bright lights are not the garish displays of Las Vegas or the proud power logos of New York. Instead, Orlando glimmers with the familiar signage of franchise America: Denny’s, Burger King, Quality Inn, Hampton Inn, Hertz. … This, truly, is a 21st century paradigm [or as we would say, a metaphor]: It is growth built on consumption, not production; a society founded not on natural resources, but upon the dissipation of capital accumulated elsewhere … a place somehow held together, to the extent it is held together at all, by a shared recognition of highway signs, brand names, TV shows, and personalities, rather than by any shared history. … Welcome to theme-park nation (Allman 2007: 3).

The “dissipation of capital accumulated elsewhere” is evidently a reference to the third leg of the Central Florida economy: retirement. A 2004 article in the Orlando Business Journal ranked “the region’s behind-the-scenes industry: the retirement industry” as the third major source of the then-recent “boomlet” in local employment, just behind construction and tourism. Retirees, the article said, are “coming here … to spend their retirement checks”—to dissipate capital accumulated elsewhere (Beall 2004).

At times, the Central Florida retirement industry seems every bit as phantasmagorical as the tackiest tourist...