Florida Facades - social class disparity in Naples - Brief Article

Vanderbilt Beach abuts the Gulf of Mexico along the northern rim of Naples, Florida. The area is increasingly dominated by hi-rise residential condominiums. Such is the market at the moment that units in new buildings are sold out months before construction starts. Four hundred thousand dollars may get you a unit, but not one with a good Gulf prospect.

Further south one gets into parts of the city where large homes dot the shoreline, relics of the old days. Hereabouts the game is to purchase one of these arks, tear it down, and build an even more immense but ultramodern house. Soon it will be possible to appreciate the old Naples only by looking at photographs.

Inland from Vanderbilt Beach is a flat area once full of orange groves. Today the crop is houses, dozens and dozens of them being planted in large subdivisions. Almost without exception, a hole is dug within a development's interior, the high water table fills it with water, and, presto, it acquires some quaint name and is dubbed a lake. The attraction for these inland-dwelling retirees is golf, golf every day of the year at a course built right in the subdivision or at many private ones that dot the area.

Most of the people who dwell in these environments are white. Few blacks are to be seen. Latinos are present in the supermarket, stocking shelves and running checkout counters, and they make up the crews employed by the various landscape companies that keep neat and tidy the lawns and shrubs that surround every house and condominium block. Indeed, some ambitious Latinos have set up their own house-cleaning operations and can be seen dashing about in spanking-clean pickup trucks. Some live in the city's few undeveloped backwaters but most have been forced to retreat a big jump inland. What with the awesome development apace, real estate taxes are effectively clearing the remaining prime land of any inhabitants of modest means.

Growth in upscale housing is also causing gridlock on the roads and threatens to jeopardize both the quantity and quality of drinking-water supplies. Only greed or extraordinary shortsightedness would seem to explain the adhesion of developers, mortgage lenders, and local government officials to the maxim apres moi le deluge. Meanwhile, what is worth real worry is the immense disparity in wealth seen here, a disparity almost beyond belief in that the usual social pyramid has been stood on its head, the rich and the well-to-do far outnumbering the lower orders. At the same time, transient farm workers inland are paid a pittance and their periodic strikes and hunger marches have proved totally unavailing, this despite the local Catholic bishop saying open-air Masses to draw attention to their plight.

The bishop and a few other persons notwithstanding, it would not appear that the Christian community in southwest Florida is concerned about such disparities. The underclass might as well exist in El Salvador as in these United States. Having been a regular winter inhabitant of Naples, I find myself increasingly uncomfortable dwelling here.

Even the architecture of the local church has come to accentuate my unease. Seen from the road it emits Spanish mission characteristics. But once inside, visitors find themselves in an amphitheater-shaped structure. The interior walls are stucco but for a high wall behind the altar which is covered with squares of plain gray stone. Some of the stones protrude in a nondescript pattern that looks as if waiting to be carved into a figure. But that precisely is the point, the uncut stone symbolizing things to come, the kingdom still in the process of creation. Meanwhile the stations of the cross are tiny metal figures, almost folded-wire creations, set atop stone pillars along the side walls. But as the pillars are barely as high as the backs of the pews, these stations are not immediately in evidence. No crucifix faces down worshippers in this church. Coincidentally, perhaps, no kneelers are provided. Indeed, but for the nearly hidden stations of the cross, an iconoclast could not make improvement on the scene.

Perhaps it is the mission church suggested by the exterior that makes this disparity strike the visitor with such force. The mission cathedral in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has a life-size crucifix that vividly demonstrates what a really bloody and awful death was inflicted on Jesus. The Spanish colonialists were brutal, but they were realists. But those who can afford to live and pray in Naples today come from a different time and place.

E.F. Roberts is the Edwin H. Woodruff Professor Emeritus of Law at Cornell Law School.

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