The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (30 page)

And others came from farther afield. There was Usha Patel, the daughter of a successful
contractor in Gujarat. Usha grew up a spoiled brat who was driven around by a chauffeur
and never had to clean her dinner plate. But everything changed in 1978, when she
was eighteen and her family married her off to an Indian engineer who worked in London.
In 1991, because of her husband’s back problems, they decided to move with their two
children to sultry Tampa, where her brother practiced medicine. In Tampa, Usha learned
once again to start from scratch and work herself to the bone. From six in the morning
till two in the afternoon she ran the cash register at a gas station her brother had
bought in a drug-ridden area in southern Hillsborough County (she was robbed twice
at gunpoint), making three hundred dollars a week. From the gas station she drove
home to Brandon in time to meet the kids after school, feed them, make sure they did
their homework. Then she put on the uniform of a Mexican restaurant where she waitressed
from four until eleven. “That is how the money came.”

Usha saved and saved, and she raised her children to do the same. When her little
boy wanted a pair of Air Jordans, she told him, “You’re paying for Michael Jordan’s
name, that is all.” She didn’t even buy a house until the children had graduated from
college.

Once the kids were working, she faced the choice that confronted other immigrants
before her who were named Patel and came from Gujarat: a gas station or a motel. She
knew about the dangers of late nights behind a cash register, so in 2005 she set her
sights on a Comfort Inn, just off I-75 where it crossed State Road 54 amid the boomburgs
of Pasco County, less than three miles from Country Walk. It was a two-story motel,
sitting between a Cracker Barrel and an Outback Steakhouse, painted green and beige,
with sixty-eight rooms at fifty dollars a night and a tiny swimming pool next to the
parking lot. Usha paid $3.2 million, half a million in cash. The rest came in two
loans, one from the Small Business Administration for $1.2 million, the other from
a commercial lender called Business Loan Express for $1.5 million. Looking back, she
came to believe the deal was fraudulent, based on a wildly overstated appraisal, but
the lenders told her what to write on the application, and she wrote it.

“They get you into debt like putting butter in your mouth,” she said. The motel was
as unremarkable as any Comfort Inn around the country, maybe more so—but it was hers.

A lot of the buyers were speculators, from all over—flippers who aimed to clear fifty
thousand dollars in six months—secretaries who made thirty-five thousand a year and
juggled five or ten investment homes worth a million dollars, car salesmen who made
their real money when housing doubled in two years. At the peak of the madness, in
2005, a house in Fort Myers sold for $399,600 on December 29 and $589,900 on December
30. Flippers were the ones driving prices to crazy heights. Mike Ross was a flipper.

Mike grew up in Newport Beach, California, and moved to Florida at age eleven. He
came from a long line of boat builders, and after dropping out of ninth grade he went
to work at the Pasadena Yacht and Country Club in Gulfport, across the bay from Tampa,
repairing the boats of very wealthy people. He worked on a crew at first, and then
for himself, and over time he made a hundred fifty dollars an hour sandblasting aluminum
engine intake vents and refinishing the factory’s lousy varnish work—varnish was a
lost art. One of his clients was the CEO of duPontREGISTRY (“The World’s Premier Luxury
Marketplace”), who flew Mike and his wife on his private jet to wax his boats in the
Bahamas. Another was Jim Walter, a Tampa multimillionaire who built cheap and quick
houses all around the country. Mike took pride in his skill, and there was no end
to the work—within three years of going solo he had 60 percent of the marina, he was
making seventy grand a year—but it was backbreaking and brutal in the heat, with chemical
compounds from the high-speed buffer flying into his face.

One day in 2003, Mike began shaking and vomiting from heat exhaustion. That’s when
he decided to stop working on boats. He was forty-two and overweight, and his body
was tired. He’d always wanted to flip houses—he was just too chicken to do it. A lot
of the guys whose boats he’d worked on made their money that way, or dabbled in it,
and they encouraged him to try. Mike and his wife bought their first investment property
with a loan from Swift Funding Corp. at 3 percent above the normal rate—a liar’s loan,
a subprime loan. It was the easiest thing in the world. He thought he’d clear 7 or
8 percent. The house cost them $50,000, and after working on the kitchen and bathroom
for two months, they turned around and sold it for $68,000. Next they spent six months
fixing up their own house in St. Petersburg, which they’d bought in 1985 for $48,000.
At 5:00 p.m. on a Friday, Mike put up a sign outside:
FOR SALE BY OWNER
. The phone started ringing off the hook, and within three days they’d sold it for
$169,000—amazing money. Then they bought a hundred-year-old farmhouse in rural Georgia,
near Mike’s parents, and moved up there to work on it. There was no fear anymore.
It was the height of the market and it was so easy.

*   *   *

And there was Michael Van Sickler.

Van Sickler grew up outside Cleveland in the seventies and eighties, when the city
was bankrupt or close to it. His father was an engineer with General Electric in Nela
Park, in charge of GE’s holiday lighting program—the Van Sicklers always had the best
Christmas lights on the block. Life in suburbia bored Mike out of his mind—on summer
days he’d sit around thinking, “God, where are the people?” Escape became possible
in high school, when he and his friends would ride the Rapid, the light rail line,
from Cleveland Heights to downtown and watch the Indians play a night game at Municipal
Stadium, which was always empty in those last years before it was torn down. Then
they’d walk over to the Flats, a factory zone by the Cuyahoga River that had been
abandoned and then converted into a bar district where everybody congregated, and
they’d try to meet girls. “That was probably when I understood the magic of what a
city could do,” he said—even a dingy Rust Belt city like Cleveland. “It starts with
people.”

After college, in the early nineties, Van Sickler followed his parents to Florida,
where they had retired in New Tampa. He went to Gainesville for a master’s in journalism—a
college class on Woodward and Bernstein, Didion, and other classics of the genre had
lit his imagination. When he got out, he was hired by a series of midsize papers around
the state. He learned his trade covering city hall, a great sandbox because he made
a lot of mistakes. His first story for the Lakeland
Ledger
was all quotes, because he felt no authority to say anything himself. That was what
he wanted to aim for—the certainty of having a subject cold, so that his readers would
finish a story knowing what to think.

In 2003, Van Sickler was hired by the
St. Petersburg Times
, the best paper in the Southeast—a dream gig. The landscape for newspapers was starting
to look bleak. They were shedding jobs, and, in a few cases, folding under pressure
from the Web and lost advertising. The
Times
was doing better than a lot of other papers, and it was destroying its cross-bay
rival,
The Tampa Tribune
, which had been stripped down by its owner, a media conglomerate in Richmond, Virginia,
to the level of fishwrap. The
Times
was owned locally, and it wasn’t a for-profit enterprise—Nelson Poynter had willed
his stock to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies upon his death in 1978—so it
didn’t have to make the same margins as wounded giants like the
Chicago Tribune
and the
Los Angeles Times
, which would soon be carved up by private equity investors in search of bigger profits.

Van Sickler and his wife, who also worked at the paper, bought a 1930 brick bungalow
in Seminole Heights, a historic neighborhood just north of downtown Tampa that was
starting to get funky after a period of blight. It brought a taste of those nights
walking around the Cleveland Flats, but Van Sickler found the whole “Next Great City”
business suspect.

When he was covering city hall at
The Palm Beach Post
, he’d gotten deeply interested in urban planning—for a while he even thought about
switching careers, until he realized that city planners had even less clout than reporters.
But his bookshelves filled up with titles like
A Field Guide to Sprawl
,
The History of the Lawn
,
Suburban Nation
, and the pair that were his bibles:
The Power Broker
and
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
. Van Sickler became a Jane Jacobs disciple. She gave a vocabulary to the desire he
had felt growing up in Cleveland Heights with no one around on those excruciating
summer afternoons: short blocks, pedestrian permeability, mixed uses, safety in eyes
on the street, density. Life was richest and most creative where people of different
backgrounds could meet face-to-face and exchange ideas. And that happened in cities—cities
of a particular kind.

Moving to Tampa clarified all this, especially after 2005, when the paper created
a beat for Van Sickler as its planning and growth reporter. The city had seemed fun
and full of promise when he was twenty-two, in the early nineties, but by the 2000s
it didn’t look to him like much of a city at all: a nine-to-five downtown with about
fifty residents, until a pair of huge condo towers that had no relation to the streets
but would suck up demand for years to come went up, while all the shopping and Class
A office space were miles away in Westshore, near the airport. Tampa had tried to
take a shortcut to greatness, but that never worked; its downtown had no coherence,
nothing to attract people beyond an office job, a hockey game, or a court case. Riding
a bike around town was dangerous, and so was trying to walk across one of the broad,
high-speed streets—Tampa ranked second in the country in bicycle and pedestrian fatalities.
If you saw someone on foot, his car had probably broken down, and a woman crouched
on the roadside for an hour without shelter had to be waiting for a bus. Commuter
rail initiatives never got past the county commission, and Tampa Bay remained the
second-largest metropolitan area in America, after Detroit, without one. As a result,
strangers were never obliged to engage with one another. “No encounters happen by
accident in Tampa,” Van Sickler said. “Or if they do, they’re traumatic.”

A strain of thought said that urban life was un-American, and Van Sickler felt its
presence in the growth machine out in Hillsborough County. The corporate-built houses
in the subdivisions looked like bunkers, with tiny windows, no breezeways or courtyards
to suit the climate, air conditioners running all the time in cavelike darkness. Inside,
families sat in their carpeted living room before a large-screen plasma TV, with the
blinds drawn against the sunlight. Outside, the long, long streets of identical houses
without shade gave people no reason to want to walk anywhere, so they went from car
to driveway to house and never got to know their neighbors. They were retreating from
the world, and their isolation was deepened by a pervasive paranoia. Signs advertising
accident attorneys, fast cash for houses, and get-rich-quick schemes were everywhere,
and auto insurance was higher in Florida than elsewhere—insurers called it “a fraudulent
state.” Florida drew the transient and rootless on the eternal promise of a second
chance, with more than its share of scammers and con men. So who was to say the guy
living next door wasn’t one of them?

A subdivision like Carriage Pointe was Jane Jacobs’s vision of hell.

In 2006, Van Sickler wrote a story about the people buying houses around Tampa. A
lot of them lived in other places, and when he tracked them down by phone, he would
ask, “Are you living in the home? Oh, is it a vacation home? Why would you be vacationing
in Ruskin—it’s not a vacation destination.” It turned out that at least half the sales
were going to investors—a huge number. The whole concept of home ownership had been
warped beyond recognition. These houses were disposable commodities. That was what
drove the demand.

Van Sickler never quite fit in in Tampa. He was tall and pale, with strawberry blond
hair, and he wore dress slacks and long-sleeved shirts. His voice sounded a little
formal, like an old-fashioned radio reporter’s, and his midwestern earnestness made
him awkward amid the glad-handing of the Sunshine State, which was the other side
of its fraudulence. He was especially earnest about his job. An investigative reporter
had to be an idealist—Van Sickler didn’t buy the idea that journalists were cynical.
The press didn’t help itself or its readers when a story gave both sides and left
it at that, because some things were objectively true and reporters should say so.

Van Sickler sometimes feared that his style as a reporter was too abrupt and prosecutorial.
Mark Sharpe, a Republican county commissioner, would get a call from Van Sickler about
campaign donations from a developer and know immediately that there was going to be
trouble. The questions would begin, innocent-sounding at first, simple matters of
fact, but they would keep coming, one question after another, and Van Sickler remembered
everything that Sharpe had ever told him, and eventually the reporter would spring
his trap, arrive at the question that Sharpe had seen coming from the start: “If this
guy’s a major contributor, do you think there was anything wrong with your vote to
waive impact fees?”

Van Sickler believed that there were two kinds of journalists—the ones who told stories,
and the ones who uncovered wrongdoing. He was definitely the latter. But the only
person he ever took down was Sonny Kim.