This Is What Happened During The Great Florida Real Estate Bubble

Joe Weisenthal (0:09)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:16)

So Tracy, we're in the middle of our series, our series about episodes about bubbles.

And of course, last week, we had the awesome one about the history of stock market bubbles. And now it's time to talk about some bubbles that aren't directly, maybe not as familiar to people.

Tracy Alloway (0:35)

Oh, okay. Well, I remember doing the catfish farming bubble. So I'm excited about what this one could be.

Joe Weisenthal (0:44)

Right, like that's the thing. So obviously people know about like the internet bubble and a few, you know, maybe they know about the tulip bubble, which we'll also be talking about in a later episode. But as you pointed out, you know, several weeks ago, we talked about the bubble in catfish.

It's a good reminder that bubbles are all over the place, everywhere throughout history and not typically in the sort of major areas that we think of.

Tracy Alloway (1:09)

Yeah, and I like the fact that we're actually doing this one because it follows on from the stock market bubble, one that we did last week quite nicely. It's something that actually happened, I think in the 1920s, before everyone got really into stocks. But people always talk about the stock market bubble of the 1920s, they kind of forget about this one.

Joe Weisenthal (1:31)

Right, exactly. So you're hinting at what it is. So as last week, we talked a lot about the stock market bubble of 1929 But a few years earlier in that decade, in the 20s, there was an extraordinary fascinating bubble in Florida real estate.

And of course, Florida has had numerous booms and busts throughout the years. That's sort of part of what makes Florida, Florida, including recently in the financial crisis, Florida got built up and then hit really hard.

But this is definitely one of my favorite bubbles. And I think there's a lot of lessons for people, even still today, in analyzing how this built up and how it eventually collapsed.

Tracy Alloway (2:11)

We're gonna have to rank our favorite bubbles on a one to 10 basis, I think, after we finish this series.

Joe Weisenthal (2:17)

Let's do that at the end of the series.

Tracy Alloway (2:19)

All right. All right, well, I'm looking forward to this one because I think we have a really good guest for it as well, right, Joe?

Joe Weisenthal (2:25)

I'm very excited about our guest today. Today, we're going to be talking to Arva Moore Parks. She's a historian.

She's an author. She's a Florida preservationist.

Basically, the perfect person. She knows Florida probably better than just about anywhere else. She knows this story and probably the perfect person to glean some insight into this extraordinary period of sort of financial and American history.

Tracy Alloway (2:50)

Great, let's do it.

Joe Weisenthal (3:00)

So without further ado, let's bring in Arva. Arva, thank you very much for joining us.

Arva Moore Parks (3:05)

Well, thank you for inviting me. I look forward to it.

Joe Weisenthal (3:07)

Before we get started with the, you know, talking about this period in Florida history, tell us how you, your experience, how did becoming a sort of preservationist and historian of Florida's history, how did that become your main interest?

Arva Moore Parks (3:26)

Okay, I was a schoolteacher teaching history in high school, and in the faculty room, there was a notice of six credits toward a master's degree for teachers. And I applied and was accepted and was fortunate that Dr. Charlton Thabo, the major Florida historian of the day, got me interested in doing a master's on the earliest community in South Florida, which was Coconut Grove. And that's where it all began.

And I never stopped researching after that.

Tracy Alloway (3:54)

Arva, Joe knows that I like to start at the beginning of things whenever we talk about certain historical events in our podcast. So when we're talking about this real estate bubble in Florida in the 1920s, walk us through how it actually got started.

Arva Moore Parks (4:13)

Well, we call it the boom in Florida. We don't call it the bubble. It's the great boom of the 1920s. And in many, many ways, George Merrick, who I've done my most recent work, moved into what was then called the back country and started selling lots in what he described as Miami's master suburb. And he had the first sales in 1921 and he expected a couple of hundred or 5,000 people showed up.

And in many ways, that began the frenzy, I guess we should say, of buying up of the back country, buying up different areas of South Florida.