The Great Land Boom and Bust
Near Miami, Florida
In the middle of the nineteen twenties, Miami went mad for real estate. Fortunes seemed to be waiting in the sand, and speculators poured in from across the country to buy and sell land they often never even saw. The most famous figures of the frenzy were the binder boys, young men in linen suits who worked the sidewalks of Flagler Street.
A binder was a small down payment that locked in the right to buy, and these binders were flipped again and again. A single lot might change hands many times in one day, its price climbing with every trade. It could not last.
By early nineteen twenty five, magazines were warning that prices had lost all connection to reality. Then in October the railroads imposed a freight embargo, halting nearly everything but food and fuel, so building materials could no longer reach the city by rail. What little could still come by sea was choked off on January tenth, nineteen twenty six, when a large steel schooner named the Prinz Valdemar, being converted into a floating hotel, sank at the mouth of Miami harbor, blocking the channel.
The boom was already collapsing. A great hurricane later that year would bury it for good.
