Victory Soap v. 2.0

Ha ha ha: revenge is sweet. This should have happened twenty years ago:

Boom of condo crash loudest in Miami

...Miami, with its unmatched volume and untold number of speculative buyers, is ripe for the hardest fall in the U.S.

"Miami is the poster child for the condo bust," said Jack McCabe, CEO of McCabe Research & Consulting, a real-estate market-analysis firm located in Deerfield Beach. "There are probably only two cities in the world with more construction: Shanghai and Dubai. Unfortunately, there is going to be a lot of foreclosures . . ., and developers, lenders, title companies and real-estate companies will go under."

When the condo craze first hit my ex-hometown, just about every apartment building in the city converted. People found themselves kicked out if they couldn't buy the apartments they'd lived in for years. The resulting apartment shortage meant I had to live in a converted garage, because I didn't want to move to Miami Beach or a crack neighborhood, and I couldn't have afforded the rent anyway. I wasn't able to rent a real apartment until I moved to Orlando. And then the condo mania hit here. I could have spit blood. But Orlando is learning its lesson too:

Orlando and other Florida cities -- Naples, Fort Myers, Tampa and Sarasota among them -- also have huge condo gluts. With 4,440 condos listed for sale, Orlando has an unprecedented 29-month supply, and last month sales plummeted 64 percent lower than a year ago.

Yeah, sucks, doesn't it? I'm crying a real tear. Rents were jacked up all over the place too, since suddenly Orlando's previous apartment glut became an apartment shortage. Real estate crazes are the scourge of the country, but especially in Florida. I don't know what it is -- people come down here, and turn into wheeler-dealers, with visions of condo-mad rich people with fistfuls of money dancing in their heads. But what they don't know is this state is quicksand to any big ambition -- Florida will have its victims, one way or another. But not me anymore. I'm out of here by May, if not before. I've had it.