Back into the cape

Few places in the country felt the foreclosure crisis as hard as Cape Coral.

The city in Lee County consistently ranked among the top five areas with the highest rate of foreclosure during the downturn following the mad frenzy of housing speculation of the boom. For example, in August 2010, as many as one in 67 homes in the area was in foreclosure, according to RealtyTrac.

But as bad as the housing collapse was, Cape Coral remains promising because of its availability of land. Considered a bedroom community to Fort Myers, Cape Coral is the third-largest city in Florida by landmass, with 122 square miles crisscrossed by nearly 400 miles of canals. It is four times bigger than Miami and three times the size of Boston.