The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here's the story of the Florida real estate frenzy of the mid 1920s, which was quickly followed by runaway stock speculation, the Crash of '29 and the Great Depression.

"One man who had sold acreage early in 1925 for twelve dollars an acre...cursed himself for his stupidity when it was resold later in the year for seventeen dollars, and then thirty dollars, and finally sixty dollars an acre. [He] was surprised a year or two afterward to find that the entire series of subsequent purchases was in default, that he could not recover the money still due him, and that his only redress was to take his land back again."

"Dead subdivisions line the highway, their pompous names half-obliterated on crumbling stucco gates. Lonely white-way lights stand guard over miles of cement sidewalks, where grass and palmetto take the place of homes that were to be .... Whole sections of outlying subdivisions are composed of unoccupied houses, past which one speeds on broad thoroughfares as if traversing a city in the grip of death."

See: Home Sweet Florida