All that is missing is the tumbleweed.  After a year’s absence, I took a walk through what was billed as "A Shopper’s Paradise" only a few, short years ago. The so-called "Shopper’s Paradise" is known as Downtown At The Gardens, an open-air shopping center lined with shops as upscale as the communities that surround this shopping Mecca. Palm Beach Gardens is an upscale suburban community about fifteen minutes north of West Palm Beach just off of I-95.  It’s gated communities and shopping malls dot the landscape, and the beach is only a ten-minute drive.

SUVs are still so prolific that it seems that high energy prices and environmental destruction never happened.

On the day I strolled through this shopping center, I met only three other people browsing at shops from the dark ceramic tiles that form much of the open spaces between the darkened windows of shop after shuttered shop.  At Starbucks, a "This store is closed" sign is tapped to a window.  Just across the way a sport’s bar has a number of signs attached to its doors stating that the property has been seized because of delinquent taxes.  I’m literally on the heels of a security guard as she makes her rounds between the open and closed shops and logs in at security stations with a device that I can’t quite make out.  Only Whole Foods, Cobb Theaters, and a few specialty stores and restaurants have managed to stay in business.  Some people still continue to eat out and buy higher-priced food even in the face of an unemployment rate that officially hovers around 10 percent.

Florida is pretty much an economic disaster.  A state that bases its revenue on regressive taxes and no state income tax is reeling from falling receipts.  One writer has called the tax structure a giant Ponzi scheme, since it depended on the boom days when one thousand newcomers migrated to the state daily.  The theory, as close to a form of "voodoo economics" as I have ever encountered, intended for newcomers to pay for the burden of services for residents who have been here longer. Now, the state is barely able to maintain its services to citizens because the only people who come here are primarily immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean Islands.  And even those newcomers sometimes return home because the economy that once boasted plentiful minimum-wage construction and landscaping jobs now offers nothing.

Just down the road from this shopping mall is Palm Beach Mall in West Palm Beach that is even more of a consumer society disaster than Downtown At The Gardens.  The only shopping activity noticeable among the blackened windows is the echo of occasional footsteps. And, Bernard Madoff’s multimillion-dollar mansion in nearby Palm Beach has been seized by Federal Marshals.

Florida is a haven for developers that once built huge developments on anything that did not move.  Close to the sea, in some cases, movement may come more quickly than some could have ever imagined because of global warming.  There was absolutely no consideration of the impact that sprawl would have on the environment or what would ever happen if the mortgage market dried up.  The first time I flew into the airport at West Palm Beach I was amazed at the rivers of light below.  This unbridled development has now come back to haunt the Sunshine State.

In a few short weeks my wife and I will pack our belongings and head north on I-95 back to New England.  Our house has been rented, and we don’t expect to return.  Here, all the elements of happenstance rather than sound economic planning have coalesced to produce a disaster.  We’re leaving before the tumbleweed starts to roll through town, and it’s not only the hurricanes or ultraconservative nature of the place that is driving us away.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer.  He can be reached at [email protected].

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