Word: dreams
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Neha Mohan was 24 years old and living the new Indian dream, with a job at a New Delhi marketing firm that hitched her wagon to the country's chugging economy. And then she let it all go. "I wasn't satisfied," she says over a cappuccino in a shopping mall on the city's southern fringe. Mohan decided to ditch business and study French. With a widowed mother to support, Mohan says her family couldn't understand why she would turn her back on so much opportunity. "There was a lot of pressure," she says. But like many other...
...elaborate water-management scheme that made southern Florida habitable has been stretched beyond capacity, yo-yoing between brutal droughts and floods, converting the Everglades into a tinderbox and a sewer, ravaging the beaches, bays, lakes and reefs that made the region so alluring in the first place. "The dream is fading," says University of South Florida historian Gary Mormino. "People think Florida is too crowded, too spoiled, too expensive, too crazy, too many immigrants - name your malady...
...Busted Dream Juan Puig embodied the Florida dream, proving that an ordinary guy with moxie could make a fortune and enjoy the high life by selling the dream to others. A Cuban immigrant, he started his career as a janitor and then a baggage handler at the Miami airport, living in a Hialeah apartment without air-conditioning, peddling sunglasses to co-workers on the side. In the 1990s, he discovered real estate, rehabbing and selling a few foreclosed duplexes, then developing town houses and branching into condo conversions as the market went nuts. He soon built a statewide empire with...
...Army engineers eventually made the dream come true by imprisoning Lake O behind a giant dike, subduing the Everglades with 2,000 miles of levees and canals, seizing control of nearly every raindrop that fell in southern Florida. Their all-out war on natural water flow made the bottom half of the state safe for an unrestrained building frenzy that began after World War II and basically continued until Juan Puig bought his billiard table. Florida now has 18 million residents, most of them south of Orlando. Such progress had a price. Half the Everglades is gone. The rest...
...quality of life remains the biggest risk to the Florida dream. So many Northeastern transplants are leaving Florida for other states with less congestion and better education systems that they have their own nickname: Halfbacks. In 2000, Florida attracted 19% of the nation's migrating seniors; by 2006, it was only 13%. Florida still has some of America's richest ZIP codes, but it ranks among the worst states in school spending and health coverage...