We’re All Florida Men

Google Earth imagery of a suburban area in Parkland, Florida, United States. Image taken from r/SuburbanHell.

Yesterday, as of the time I’m writing this, somebody posted the above image on the subreddit titled SuburbanHell. They posed the question about whether it would be calm or creepy living in the last home prior to the swampland in this part of southern Florida. 

Now, the image above is of the city of Parkland in Broward County. It’s an affluent suburb of Miami. According to its Wikipedia article , Parkland’s zoning laws were designed in a way so that the city would keep living up to its name. Apparently, there were no stores or even traffic lights there until the mid-1990s to early 2000s. Some would call that an example of why it’s  suburban hell, but it’s the sort of Florida many people dream of.

It needs to be said that Parkland, like so many other places in the United States, is now known for a horrific tragedy. In this case, it’s the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that spurred the March For Our Lives movement against gun violence in the United States. David Hogg, who served as a DNC vice chair for a few months ending last month, survived that shooting. But this blog post is not about gun violence, but rather something equally tragic that cities like Parkland risk. We’ll get to that later.

Florida has a lot of nicknames. Sometimes it’s called “America’s wang” or something to that effect. Other times, it’s become infamous for the “Florida Man” meme. You can literally search your birthday and you’ll find a list of insane “Florida man” headlines that happened on that day in history. It’s a pretty wild place.

Until relatively recently, Florida was the swing state in American politics. Whatever party garnered a plurality of the vote in Florida would almost always win the presidential election. No doubt the most infamous example of this is the 2000 election, during which the margin was hundreds of votes and the Supreme Court issued its controversial decision to halt the recount and declare George W. Bush the President-elect. 

But 2000 is hardly the only time Florida proved itself as a swing state. In 2016, as Donald Trump lost the popular vote nationwide by about two percentage points, he carried Florida by a 1.2% margin. And two years later, despite a blue wave nationally, three-term incumbent Democratic Senator Bill Nelson lost to Republican Governor Rick Scott by 10,033 votes out of over eight million. At the time, it was easy to blame the loss on Nelson’s age and the perception that he was “asleep at the wheel.” He looked like they took a skeleton, draped some skin over it, and said “let’s call him Bill Nelson.” But that’s beside the point.

In addition to its reputation for being razor-thin, Florida also counts its votes incredibly quickly. Early and mail-in votes can be counted by election officials as soon as they’re received. Even in the 2020 election, infamous for how slowly votes were counted due to the COVID-induced mail voting surge, Florida had 99 percent of its vote in within a few hours. In Florida, you’d know your fate in a hurry. And you still do, not least because of what I’ll say in the next paragraph.

Nowadays, Florida is a bona fide red state, which is made clear by the fact that Rick Scott won reelection last year by nearly 13 percentage points. Donald Trump won the state by roughly the same amount, and it really serves as a testament to how many Republican voters have been flocking to the state in recent years. Yes, the state that gave us politicians like Ron DeSantis and musicians like Forgiato Blow is now firmly MAGA-coded.

And honestly, I don’t blame Democrats for refusing to move to Florida. If I lived there, I’d get the hell out ASAP. Electoral politics isn’t even the only reason why.

Contrary to popular belief among the MAGA movement, climate change is real and caused by human activity. In other countries, it isn’t a political debate; it’s just a fact of life that needs to be dealt with via reducing our carbon emissions and adapting to what climate chaos we’ve already locked in. But Florida, being a state that’s attracted so many Republican voters, is a hotbed of climate denial. 

Florida has been dubbed the country’s “riskiest peninsula.” And I want to be clear: There’s no place on Earth that is not and will not be severely affected by the climate crisis, either eventually or immediately. That being said, Florida is basically the perfect storm, no pun intended.

The state is incredibly vulnerable to sea level rise, given that so much of its population is located so close to the ocean. They say the sea is rising by one inch every three years. It might rise two feet, or a little more, in the average lifetime, and that might not sound like much, but it’s not just about the baseline sea level. Not only that, but this has major implications for urban policy in the state. (Or at least, it would if so many of the state’s officials weren’t climate deniers).

According to a study from a few years ago, about one million Florida properties could become “chronically flooded” in the coming decades. Financially speaking, this means that the state would lose about $600 billion this century. And I’m not really a fan of putting a dollar value on human livelihoods, because it’s so much more than just money. But it’s what I’ll go with in this case.

Yesterday, upon browsing that Reddit thread about Parkland, I saw that someone recommended an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible. This podcast basically explores the way design impacts our lives in ways the average person doesn’t appreciate. Perhaps they’ve got an episode about supposed “riot-proof” architecture, but I’ll have to look for it myself if so.

The podcast episode in question, a transcript of which I’ll link here talks about the Florida city of Cape Coral. And honestly, it might have been even more poorly thought-out than Phoenix. At least indigenous peoples had managed to make Phoenix work in the past!

In 1961, game show The Price Is Right ran an episode in which players bid on a home in this new city called Cape Coral. You might call it Florida’s version of Levittown, a “perfect” suburban community that gave every household its little slice of paradise. Of course, Levittown has its own ugly racial history that I won’t get into here. The price for the house, or at least the value that would earn you the prize if you bid closest to it, was only slightly over $15,000. While that would be a lot more nominal money in 2025 terms, it’s still pretty insane that homes were being sold for such a low price.

At the time this episode aired, the words “climate change” had not yet entered the public consciousness to a major extent, even if Big Oil already knew the destructive impact their industry was having on the environment. Getting your own slice of “paradise” in Florida was probably pretty enticing back then, especially at such a low price. 

The podcast episode linked above even talks about how they’d fly you over Cape Coral in a Cessna bushplane and show you the land you’d purchased from above, dropping a bag of flour or sugar onto said lot. You gotta wonder if those bags ever missed their target - or, for that matter, hit someone on the ground. 

In recent years, of course, the climate crisis has gotten worse, and indeed accelerated. And again, everywhere in the country is affected by this. In my home state of Massachusetts, it doesn’t snow as much as it used to when I was a kid, and we have more days of severe heat in the summer than we once did. The loss of winter is of course depressing (indeed, it makes me sadder than I can really say here), whereas the heat waves are just unpleasant to live through. During the one a few weeks ago in which temperatures reached about 105°F (40.6°C) one day, I kept telling myself that if I lived in Phoenix it would be like that for possibly weeks at a time.

That’s the thing: Even if there’s no such thing as a “climate haven”, as Hurricane Helene reinforced, some places are riskier than others. 

Insurance companies are hardly progressive, at least politically speaking. The health insurance ghouls are, well, ghouls, to the point where lots of people celebrate Luigi Mangione for killing Brian Thompson this past December. (Given that United Healthcare has changed some policies, it’s quite possible Mangione saved a few orders of magnitude more lives than he took, but that’s not the point here). 

Home insurance companies aren’t some woke climate activists either. The fact remains, however, that even if you don’t believe in climate change, your home insurance company certainly does. That’s why home insurance premiums are so high in Florida, if you can get home insurance at all. It’s kind of ironic, not to mention tragic, that a state with so many climate change-impacted disasters has seen so many climate deniers take power. Again, though, you can blame it on the sheer number of people who’ve been moving to Florida in recent years.

It’s a common trend in this country that honestly serves as an exhibit of the phrase “American Idiot” that’s best known as a popular song by Green Day. Many Americans, even as climate change gets worse, have been moving to Florida (a state that’s been battered by hurricanes that keep getting more severe on average), as well as Arizona (a state that’s literally running out of water as it gets hotter and hotter). Both states rank in the top ten for population growth rate , and in the top five in terms of internal migration (that is, people moving there from other states). 

Cape Coral might have been paradise once thanks to its numerous canals. Some might call it the Venice of Florida, but it’s sinking even faster than the original Venice. Whenever homes are rebuilt thanks to the ultra-expensive home insurance that the owners managed to take out, they’re usually rebuilt on stilts, and that costs even more money. And ultimately, the stilts only put a Band-Aid on the problem - they aren’t going to fix it entirely.

In the long run, what this country truly needs is a reckoning. And I’m not just talking about a reckoning in terms of deciding where to live based on a scientific understanding of the climate crisis and what places are most affected by different climate-related hazards.

Rather, we need to address this country’s culture. More specifically, the biggest problem with American political culture is that unlike other countries, we don’t solve problems when they arise. We just stick our heads in the sand and prefer to pretend they don’t exist.

 I’ve brought this example up so often that it’s like beating a dead horse at this point, but if Sandy Hook didn’t motivate us to pass actual gun control at the national level, nothing will. Before the bodies were even cold, the NRA media machine knew they’d need to use every trick in the book to draw any conclusion other than “pass gun control right away”. Therefore, Alex Jones et al promoted conspiracy theories that the children and teachers were actors, that the attack was a false flag, or that the people involved had never existed at all. 

Sandy Hook isn’t the only example. Even after our horrific COVID response - really, the word response is a bit of a stretch - we didn’t pass universal health insurance. Nor did we do anything to prevent the same genocidal maniac from taking power again to possibly let millions more die from bird flu. More people will be stripped of their health insurance even as most other countries debate over serious issues like whether the families of hospital patients should be charged for parking. 

And, of course, the climate crisis is the most egregious example. Gun violence and medical bills mostly only affect American citizens, but climate change is going to kill all of us if we don’t do anything about it. The American public had no right to elect Donald Trump, and the whole world is going to pay for it.