As One Market Slows, Another Grows
When fewer people apply for Florida mortgages, the fallout isn’t hard to find. Although this is one you might not have seen coming.
As home prices fall along the Gulf Coast, and throughout the Southwest Florida housing market, certain suburbs like have become havens for “grow houses” - where high-grade marijuana is cultivated and harvested.
Lehigh Acres, North Port and Port Charlotte in particular have been found to be locations for this rising trend.
The homes are rented or bought, the windows boarded up, and then elaborate irrigation and electrical systems are rigged inside, with enough water, power and fertilizer to grow hundreds of plants.
A single caretaker often stays at the home to tend to the crop.
Detectives in Sarasota County have discovered four such houses this year - the majority in North Port, where reasonably priced, secluded homes abound. Charlotte County detectives have made another half-dozen raids.
A task force working with the DEA has raided 25 grow houses in Lee County so far this year. News that another grow house has been discovered is a weekly, if not daily, occurrence.
According to the DEA, the Southwest Florida housing market is now the state’s biggest hot spot for grow houses.
“The common denominator is the affordable housing,” said Florida Highway Patrol Sgt. Daniel D. Hinton, who is helping to coordinate a task force.
A three-bedroom house in Miami costs between $350,000 to $400,000, Hinton said, but a similar house in North Port can still cost less than $200,000.
That’s a doable Florida mortgage, and in this case, that’s enough to make the profit margins solid for this illicit activity.
“They’re coming over here from the east coast,” Hinton said. “It’s organized crime that’s not necessarily so organized.”
Of those 25 houses that the task force has raided, all parties operating them have links to other areas. Every time investigators pick up on a technique that the growers are using, they switch things up again.
After they are arrested, the suspects almost always refuse to tell anyone who provided the front money for the home, or where the product was headed after harvest.
“It’s all a game,” Bell said. “They won’t give you any other information. This is what they did and they’re going to take full responsibility for it.”
Continue reading this Sarasota Herald-Tribune about “grow houses” in a down market …
