Ephemeral Naples

For its mid-winter meeting the Forum met at the Waldorf-Astoria, five miles up the beach from Naples.   Below and east of there is no-mans land: the Everglades, Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge, Big Cypress National Park, and Florida Panther Wildlife Refuge.  Alligators prowl the highway known as Alligator Alley leading across to Miami.   They share apex predator status with Burmese pythons.  The snakes unlock their jaws and swallow baby alligators whole; the alligators snatch the snakes and devour them under water.

The Darwinian spirit infects local litigators too.  Arriving in Naples there was buzz at the Forum about the ongoing Tampa defamation trial against a local shock jock, Bubba the Love Sponge Clem.  The Plaintiff’s attorney visited a local steak house after court last week for dinner.   There, he was bemused by an attractive young woman.  Much drinking and flirting ensued.  At the end of the evening the woman asked if the attorney would please drive her car to her apartment, a short distance away, because she had consumed too much alcohol.  The gentleman obliged and was promptly arrested by the local police for drunk driving and was made to spend the night in jail.  The story is that the police had been alerted by the vixen and had been lying in wait for some time at her request.  Oh, and she was a paralegal for the defense firm.  This was all over the news with a non-sequestered jury.   At the trial court’s hearing on motion for mistrial—on the grounds that the publicity of the arrest must surely have contaminated the jury—it was confirmed that the woman had lied about the identity of her employer.  The paralegal and defense attorneys refused to answer questions, asserting their right against self-incrimination.  The judge refused to grant a mistrial.  As Kerry Kester might say, we are not in Nebraska anymore, folks.  And mind those snakes. 

A band of mangroves and a lagoon separate the hotel from the beach.  My room

afforded an expansive view across a long row of  condominium and hotel towers that line the Gulf of Mexico up and down the beach in this area.  One can imagine them watching out across the gulf, moment frame steel relics abandoned to hurricanes and a rising sea in the not too distant future.   Florida is flat.  The average elevation of Naples is less than 10 feet above sea level.  This week the waves lapped peacefully on a sliver of beach.  But far inland, on the way to the airport, I noted that construction excavations also exposed sand.  The landscape is covered with lakes and ponds.  Surface water is said to be just below the surface everywhere, and it won’t take much for this to be just above the surface.  So the state worries about global warming.  Predictions for sea level rise over the balance of this century vary from .5 feet to more than six feet.  Anyway it plays out, Florida will be affected more than most. 

Most of the construction in and around Naples took place after hurricane Donna made a direct hit on Naples and devastated the area in 1960.  My taxi driver on the way back to the airport says he arrived from Haiti fifteen years ago.  In 2002 to 2006 he drove cement trucks for Cemex.  “They paid me $1,050 per week,” he said.  “Things were really good.”  He speculated with the purchase of a plot of land for $12,000, but he couldn’t really afford it.  “Just pay me $2,000 and $100/month,” said the seller.  That worked out well.  In 2006 he sold the land for $60,000.  He promptly turned around and invested in two other lots for $25,000 each.  When the crash came, he was laid off by the cement company along with most other drivers, he lost one of his lots in foreclosure, and the other one is now worth $5,000.  “It’s not coming back the same,” he says. 

In the meantime, at the upscale Gulf Coast InternationalProperties website they are bullish: 

“It appears that the worst is behind us and the future is paved in (developing) dirt.  All across Southwest Florida the business of building is once again booming.  It’s not just a single-family home here and there in The Moorings or small multi family developments in Old Naples but the larger developers like D.R. Horton and GL Homes are making land purchases on a large scale.  In Lee and Collier county 2700 single and multi-family permits have been pulled.  In the City of Naples single-family permits are up more than 50% over last year according to the Naples Daily News.  If you drive through the streets of the downtown neighborhoods whether it be Port Royal, Aqualane Shores, or The Moorings, there is new construction everywhere you look.” 

There will be construction.  There will be actions for damages.  The humidity was low this week.  I saw no alligators, but I’m sure they were there just out of sight.