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Perhaps the clearest indication of the area's hypertrophy is the state of its public schools and welfare agencies. There the precarious prosperity of a low-paying but fast-growing service sector is quickly exposed. Osceola County had only 19,000 residents in 1960; now it has that many hotel rooms. Many of the maids and clerks who work in them earn $4 to $6 an hour without health insurance in a community that requires a car. They are a mishap away from poverty. "Many people come down here chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but they come down unprepared," says Sally David, who helps steer new families to affordable housing in the county. "They don't have enough money to survive if their car breaks down or if they have to go home when they don't make it."
The lucky members of this fragile immigrant class live in Osceola's throng of trailers. Welfare workers, who have more than tripled their case loads in the past decade, report finding newcomers sleeping in cars or in the woods. At Osceola High School last year, transience was the only constant: 700 of the school's 2,200 students were newcomers; 500 students withdrew before the end of the term. "Kids in the classroom don't even know the other kids in the classroom. The teacher has to say, 'Hey, you,' and point," says David Campbell, executive director of the county's mental-health agency. The Orange County school system is so overcrowded that temporary classrooms have gone up on almost all the 112 school sites.
Part of this mess came about because Orlando's glowing prospects turned nearly everyone into a developer. Land that went for $200 an acre before Disney Day can soar overnight to $100,000 on the rumor that Disney is nosing around. Even Herbie Pugh, one of the area's most vocal environmentalists, admits that he sold 10 acres to a developer eight years ago and pocketed $100,000 in return. "They offered me such a good price, I couldn't resist," he says. Climatic freezes that devastated the orange groves three times in the past 10 years have added to the frenzy by driving farmers into developers' arms.
County commissioners say that until recently, any discussion of controlling growth brought charges of communism. Now local leaders say residents have pulled the growth alarm, but in petty ways and without a corresponding sense of commitment to the metropolitan region as a whole. Orange County commissioner Donegan says he had a group of voters come by his office not long ago to ask him to stop a luxurious 4,000-sq.-ft. house from going up in their neighborhood because they were convinced that the project would raise the value of their homes and thus their tax bills.