General Development Corporation
(GDC) paid about $45 an acre for Florida land in 1954, and advertised
home sites for "$10 down and $10 a month for 10 years."
GDC decided to incorporate 100,000 acres in Sarasota County as the city of North Port Charlotte in order to have more control of the development. Because residents were needed to
vote on the incorporation, the company moved in employee families who lived rent-free for a year. On June 16, 1959, the twenty-one residents unanimously voted to incorporate. Within a year, the North Port Charlotte city government approved GDC petitions to annex an additional forty-seven square miles. GDC donated a sixteen-acre park with community center and pool, and five acres for schools and parks to the city.
The Mackle brothers who had formed General Development Corporation were the first construction contractors. They built homes from the $8,970 two-bedroom, one-bath homes which sold for $270 down, $58 a month to the $16,260 three- bedroom, two-bath homes for $860 down, $110 a month. The Mackle brothers, Elliot, Robert, and Frank Jr., resigned from GDC in 1961, and their building contract expired in 1962.
Homeowners began filing lawsuits against General Development Corporation in 1986, claiming GDC sold overvalued properties. GDC declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1990 and agreed to set up a $169 million restitution fund. Four senior GDC officers spent two years in jail on fraud and conspiracy charges. A Miami federal judge who decided the charge of scheming to defraud had not been proved within the meaning of the federal statutes ordered their release.
North Port (the name changed in 1974) is the Florida city with the fourth largest land mass (seventy-six square miles). By 1998 it was about fifteen percent developed.