This is Gulf Coast life, Im Mike Kiniry Thanks for joining us.

In 2008, during the so-called Great Recession, our real estate markets and financial institutions collapsed under the weight of over expectation.

And you might even say greed.

Homes became investments instead of places to call “home” Mortgages became bundled financial instruments instead of financial arrangements to make a big purchase over time Loans were handed out with so without so much of as a glance at proof of income or strength of one's financial footing, it all came tumbling down and suddenly there were long lines of food pantries filled with people who never dreamed they would be in need of food assistance.

Foreclosure court dockets were so overfilled they were years behind keeping u Foreclosure tours became a thing.

Empty homes, often degraded, were all over the place, especially here in southwest Florida.

And while today's economic and market conditions are far from directly analogous, we are definitely in what economists call a k shaped economy.

The top line of the K is people with property and investments and solid income, for whom things probably feel pretty solid.

The bottom line of the K is people who rent and have little or no investments, and who live paycheck to paycheck, for whom cost of living concerns feel very real, and the markets are being propped up by AI company and tech stocks that are starting to look a bit unstable.

University Press of Florida recently rereleased a book that was first published in 2010 called Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Florida's Great Recession.

It's, if I can characterize it this way.

Part memoir, part Florida history, and part sociological exploration of the world.

In the year or so after that 2008 collapse, I'm joined today by its author, Paul Reyes.

He's also editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Welcome to the show, Paul.

Thanks for having me.

So the setting for a lot of your book is the foreclosed homes being cleaned out in the Tampa area with you working for your father alongside his small team?

Where were you at in your life and your career at that time?

Which would have been like 2009?

Well, actually.

2009, I was I was in it.

I had, you know, my father's been in construction for decades.

He's came to this country as an exile from Cuba and eventually studied engineering at Temple and became an architect and, and then got into construction.

And he was building fast food restaurants during my youth.

And so it became something of a, I don't know, a tradition to accompany him to these jobs.

We moved around a lot, but always kept coming back to Florida.

And so construction was something of a of a bond, a bonding ritual between us.

So as I matriculated through college and then went to work, you know, I moved up and down the East Coast, I went to different cities, you know, as I reset and would move to another city or between jobs or what have you.

I would always come back to Tampa and work for him again.

And around the 90s, you know, I got a degree MFA at University of Florida in fiction.

Didn't really know what to do with that.

I was trying to work on a novel.

At the same time, I moved back home to save some money so I could move to New York.

And I worked for him, and at that time, he was in.

He took his skills in construction and was renovating homes for banks that had foreclosed on him.

Now, in the 90s, you know, nobody was really paying much attention to foreclosures.

They were kind of on the margins of the real estate market.

Right.

But for someone who was invested in storytelling and character study, these foreclosures and the the flotsam and the evidence and the just, the junk that was left behind were fascinating to me because they provided what I called a literary forensic exercise, by which I would just go into these homes.

And before we threw everything in the garbage bags and toss them in the dumpster, I would collect objects, whether it was an X-ray or a letter from a sheriff or from a, you know, a bill from a hospital or a a a greeting card from a daughter to a mom saying, you know, hang in there, mommy and I would get these boxes and fill them with this stuff and try to piece together how these individuals arrived at this fate.

And I tried to work on that as a, as a, as a novel, and it just really wasn't coming together because it was the circumstances were so extreme.

Meanwhile, after I, you know, saved up enough money, I moved to New York.

I ended up in magazines by accident, and I realized there was a rich tradition of taking those skills, those that toolkit that you apply to fiction and applying it to journalism.

And I was late to that party, but I just embraced it.

And, you know, it was epiphany.

It was an epiphany for me that you could do this.

And about the time, you know, 2007, 2008, I was checking in with him to ask about the houses, to hear more stories.

I was, you know, I was neck deep in magazines and magazine journalism and reading the headlines and basically putting together this equation where the headlines were talking about just the dire forecast economically.

And at the same time, my father was talking about how overwhelmed he was with these foreclosures.

And I realized that there was basically a, you know, an opportunity to never let a good crisis go to waste.

To tell this story from the ground up.

And so I basically took all of that evidence and all of these stories that we were acquiring, from our work on the ground and pitched a story to a magazine that I had a relationship with and said, look, a lot of the, you know, a lot of the news about the, the, the impending housing crisis, which really hadn't landed yet, is focused on Washington and focused on policymakers in the boardrooms on Wall Street.

But nobody's telling the story from the ground up.

And so that's how I knew I had an angle on something to tell it in a fresh way.

And that was around.

I will tell you the timing.

It was interesting because that was around, 2008.

Right.

And so.

What happened.

Was that you were you were kind of hit you, you saw something coming that wasn't quite fully flourishing yet or the.

I. Was yeah.

This was a convergence of observation.

You know, being in the right place at the right time and luck.

Because what happened was I pitched this story to Harper's Magazine.

They assigned it.

I went down there for several months, moved back in with my dad, worked on this.

We we put the story together.

And the way magazines work is that an issue?

Lands about a few weeks before the actual date on the magazine's cover.

And if I've got this correct, you know, it's it's a little bit blurry for me now, but that story landed on it was a cover story, and it hit the newsstands the same week that Lehman Brothers collapsed.

So the timing was extraordinary.

And that's when everyone realized that there was another way to approach this crisis.

It wasn't just, you know, what was Bernanke thinking, but was, you know, what's happening to these people who are getting booted from their homes and they have to live on the street.

And I was in a position to tell that.

And you, I mean, you I encourage listeners to read the book because it's an interesting take, especially if you lived here in Southwest Florida, which, by the way, I was interested to see your book kind of wound up in my neighborhood down here.

But we'll get to that.

Because you really did, you know, you really were on the ground, like, literally doing the work while you were collecting the, you know, the insights in the in the personalities and things like that.

How long were you, how long were you spending in the homes with the people collecting those stories?

Was it months?

Was it a full year?

Well, what happened was, you know, I would do it off and on for years and then for this reporting assignment.

It was I think it was about 3 to 6 months.

Now, for the most part, you know, you would just collect these things and tell these stories and you would assemble it and you would and you would just try to piece it together like a detective.

But I realized in order for this to sustain, and my instincts were telling me that there was there was something bigger going on than just me.

Analyzing this, this, these leftovers.

Looking at this material and trying to, basically speculate, you know, what these people were going through that was a little bit journalistically irresponsible.

I thought so at a certain point, very quickly, I started to use the materials at hand to try and find them.

And to try to give voice to these people, because that was the most important thing to me.

I didn't want, you know, I had an opportunity.

And I talk about this all the time with students.

First person journalism, literary journalism, narrative journalism, the first person singular, the author.

It's an incredible opportunity to kind of breathe life into a journalistic story.

But at the same time, you've you've really got to be careful about the degree to which you're, you're a character in it.

And really, I've always seen the first person singular as a conduit to other people.

So my only utility in this was the ability to, you know, try and translate and render what I was seeing, what I was smelling, what I was experiencing, all of the kind of visceral details, but also act as a bridge to these people to give them voice.

And that was the one of the main characters in that Harper's story.

The deacon, who we eventually tracked, who I eventually tracked down.

And sat down with him and talked to him about how he ended up in this situation.

You know, and there's a there's a fundamental reason for that.

You know, I don't want to be too long winded here.

But I do want to circle back to something that you would you would mention in your introduction.

One of my main motivations for doing this was, and I remember.

Oh, I forget the fellas name from MSNBC, but there was this, this, this moment, this kind of almost viral at the time.

Right?

This cable news moment when, they were on the on the floor of the of the of the of their on the trading floor at Wall Street and there was this sense that, this miss MSNBC reporter was talking about the fact that these that this mess was created by irresponsible homeowners who were using these homes as credit cards, lines of credit that they couldn't pay back and never really intended to pay back because of the nature of the market.

You know, I bought on the high end, I bought in 2006, and I eventually lost that home.

So I ended up in the end becoming one of my own characters.

And what I realized from that experience and from what I was witnessing on the ground, is that wasn't the story.

There was this binary, right?

That it was about irresponsible homeownership or people who were just plain stupid.

And I realized it was a lot messier.

There was a lot of people with good intentions who were duped by lending companies, who put out very sophisticated literature to encourage them to get out of their circumstances, which included job losses.

Right.

And so that was really one of the main purposes of the book, was to get in that messy middle space where it wasn't just about two different sets of bad guys and irresponsible actors.

We we chatted a little bit when we before we started recording about why release it now.

And, you know, when I saw the press release for it, for some reason it just resonated with me because I feel like, well, maybe, you know, the situation we're in now is in no way the same as 2008 or 2009.

I just feel like, you know, something doesn't seem to add quite up.

Is that why you got you decided to rerelease it now?

Well, I just and it wasn't necessarily my decision as much as it.

Was a mission.

You know, the book, this is a little bit of publishing Inside Baseball, but the the book, you know, never went to paperback the first time around.

And I felt as, you know, just as a literary exercise, as a journalistic exercise, it was unique enough that that was a, you know, that really wasn't a proper fate for it.

And so I got the rights back from the publisher, and just for the let you know, for the last 15 years, looked around for a publisher who would be willing to to republish it out in paperback.

I think that the timing is resonant.

I think we are approaching.

We're definitely in a kind of bubble.

Right?

I don't, you know, obviously this bubble, not all, but no two bubbles are the same, right?

I have no idea how to predict the degree to which our current AI bubble will mimic or replicate the catastrophic consequences of the housing bubble, but something is going to happen.

A shoe will drop.

And so we're keeping a close eye on it.

But, you know, the current circumstances are evolving so quickly and with so many different turns and pivots that I think it's hard to to prognosticate at all.

You know.

You know what I kept thinking as I was reading it is we had back then what they called the Ninja loans.

What was that?

It's like no income, no job, no assets or whatever.

And, you know, you look at how all the AI stuff is being financed and how they, you know, they they spend $1 trillion, they bring in, you know, $50 billion.

It's almost like they're giving each other and they're borrowing.

It's like the AI companies are getting the Ninja loans.

Does that make sense?

I know that I'm not I'm not an economist, but but they're getting huge loans that are being repackaged now, by the way, in case you're not aware of that, the debt of AI companies is being repackaged and sold to institutional investors.

But they're getting these these trillion dollar loans when they only have $50 billion of income.

Right.

And again, two non economists sort of yeah.

This is what they're seeing to what they're seeing.

But you do also have this kind of closed system of, of financing within their own, you know, subsidiaries.

And that becomes a dangerous loop.

And again, you know, it's both the, the wonderful, you know, disco ball party of the, of the, of the stock market, but also the sins of the market where this is, you know, we're talking about the illusion of shareholder wealth versus productivity.

And that's a different conversation.

That's a much bigger problem.

But yeah, when you have a, a financial culture and a kind of financial mindset based on fee generation, you know, what you're talking about is the exact same thing as the collateralized debt obligations that got the housing market to the point where it it was just inevitably a failure when when the individuals in these systems and in this culture are motivated by fees and nothing else.

Right.

Not sustainability.

Yeah, that's a recipe for disaster.

So in that way, they're remarkably parallel.

Well, again, one more disclaimer.

Neither of us are economists.

So this is just a radio host in a in a literary review editor talking about this, I want to go back to what I alluded to.

You know, toward the end of your book, you wind up in Lehigh Acres.

We're here in Lee County.

You know, Lehigh Acres is right down the road.

I know people who live there.

You know, do you, do you?

Does your family still have the lot?

I guess I just want to start there.

Yeah, we still have the law.

My father still gets letters from investors offering.

You know, to buy that lot.

The the price hasn't climbed too much.

Not enough to not enough to motivate him to sell off my legacy that he will bequeath to me.

Right.

That incredible sand, sand choked lot.

Well, and I you know, I toward the end especially, I kept pulling up Google Maps and I could look at like, you know, you talk about the place Kaluza reserve or whatever out there in Alva and the places that you were going through in 2008 and how, you know, like ghost developments and, you know, a lot of it's rebounded, a lot of it.

I mean, that Kaluza reserve place, you know, there are million plus dollar homes for sale there and, you know, $100,000 lots still available.

So I guess, you know, as bad as it was, it did come back around here.

I mean, we may be in a new kind of thing, but it was interesting to like, look at the empty neighborhoods that you were walking through that were overgrown, that now have homes in them.

Yeah.

Well, you know, look, as the radius of unaffordable extends, you're going to have people making do and they're going to figure out that sacrifice.

And in this case, you know, where the jobs going in the nature of work is such that people can tell a commute more than they could back then.

Right?

Are they willing to put up with a commute?

Does the price of gas even allow for that?

How long can they sustain that?

So yeah, it'll be interesting to go back down there and see the degree to which it has been developed.

And hopefully it provides some stability for people in that region, that part of the state.

The, the, the home that you talk about that apparently started on Sanibel and got moved there.

So it was a beach house and Lehigh Acres is still there.

You can find it on Google Earth.

I hope they're doing well.

You can check in with them.

You know, but to get back into the stories that you were telling from the beginning, and we don't have a ton of time to go over this, but for reader or for listeners, it's really, you know, as you said, there were so many people who were offered, you know, shady loans that the person who was giving the who was writing the loan, knew you weren't going to be able to pay back.

And it was everybody making all that money off of the transactions and whatnot.

And it's just a really good reminder of how out of whack things got, I guess, is what I'm saying.

Yeah.

And you know, the, the, the, the one of the compelling things for me is and this has guided my work since then as a journalist, I realized that once a home was transformed into a foreclosure, it became what I ended up calling a crisis ecosystem.

And that was the operating metaphor for the book.

And what I mean by that is it, you know, within an ecosystem, you have various organisms that cooperate and compete in order to survive.

And what was fascinating to me was to see how that, you know, that cinderblock structure suddenly transformed with all of this value to different people who didn't really pay attention to it otherwise, whether, you know, in Miami was it became housing for the homeless, housing activists, you know, real estate vultures looking to pick up distressed properties.

People looking to, you know, seeking to make a political point about the status of that home, about the nature of loans and about the nature of the economy.

So it was really fascinating thing to watch.

And that metaphor seems to have sustained, and carried over to, you know, to other subjects of, of, of my work.

I don't know what the next crisis ecosystem will be, but I'm sure, unfortunately, one is out there.

So I my radar is, is tuned to figure out what it is and to see if I can look at those human stories that kind of evolve out of that.

What I said this in the intro, but what I kept making me think is, and I'm not sure everything's going to change this in today's world, but looking at your home as your investment rather than as your as your home, you know, that's all part of this equation to is, you know, people, you buy your house, you expect it to appreciate you're able to make some money off of it.

And so it, it maybe takes away from just this is my home to this is my investment in a way that's maybe not great.

I don't know, that's just my thought.

I don't know, but I but I disagree slightly because I think when you think about postwar post-World War two, just how so many factors have shaped a generation, generations of how we think about that home.

Right.

I would say that that's exactly true for me, but it's also something I've been taught I have I've never known, you know, I've never conceived of a home apart from those two that the that duality, those two factors.

Yes.

It is a sentimental place that has all of this meaning with regard to what it means for family, what it means to achieve something.

But entwined with that is the idea that it increases in value.

So you bring up something that's to me is fascinating is, you know, the American dream.

Yes, it's a sentimental concept, but it's also sentiment knotted together with financial finances, which is all part of security.

Right?

Financial stability.

Financial wealth is is basically a form of security that we've been, you know, that we would naturally be attracted to.

But we've also been taught to pursue.

And I guess when everything goes off the rails because of various forms of malfeasance, you lose both of those things.

You lose the sentimentality because every one of those homes that you were going through with that crew had sentimentality in it, and it had presumed value in it at one point.

And all of a sudden it had neither for, you know, if not hundreds, if not millions, at least hundreds of thousands of people around here.

Yeah.

And I think true to the ecosystem metaphor, you know, it didn't make it into the book.

There was about sheets, I don't know, a almost a hundred pages that I had to cut before we, you know, I, I finally turned it in, what didn't make it into the book.

But what was definitely true was the degree to which, you know, at the end of that cycle, you would see another family move in.

And as horrible as the circumstances were for, you know, any of these homes that themselves were characters in the book that I documented, when I circled back around, I would meet new families for whom that home, for all of the distress that it had been through, was an opportunity for them.

And they had just moved to this country, or they had just gotten a new job, or they had just relocated.

And so it it again, it participated in that in that cycle, you know.

Last question and then make it quick.

Do you still have the agave cactus the folks in the beach house gave you?

It's been planted.

It's it.

Yeah, it's down in Tampa.

It's in the backyard.

Paul Reyes is author of Exiles in Eden Life Among the Ruins of Florida's Great Recession, and editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Thanks for your time, Paul, and for the trip down.

I guess not so great memory lane.

It really did feel timely, even though it's a 16 year old book.

Yeah, I appreciate it very much.

Exiles in Eden is now available in paperback.

Wherever you find books.

We'll have a link to it on and to his website at WGCU.ORG/GCL Our show today was produced by yours truly with audio and video production by Matt Krause For now, thanks for listening.

I'm Mike Kiniry This is WGCU FM Fort Myers 90.1 WMKO Marco Island 91.7 FM.

We are NPR for Southwest Florida.