How Florida Is Building America's Biggest City

From Miami to Jacksonville and from Tampa to Orlando, Florida's cities have spent decades growing into each other. On a map, it looks like one enormous city in the making. But Florida isn't building a city — it's building hundreds of miles of suburbs with almost nothing to hold them together. And in 2025, the engine behind all of it suddenly slowed: Americans stopped moving to Florida in the numbers they used to, prices began to fall, and the state's big rail bet landed in bankruptcy court. This is how Florida grew this way, and what happens when the growth machine stops running on autopilot.